Today, I commented to one of my daughters that I was examining residuals. She asked if that was a kind of insect, like a termite. I told her no, but they still were bugging me. To a statistician, all of the variance in the world is divided into two groups, variance you can explain and…
I’m on Twitter a lot, and more to the point, I read a whole lot of blogs and web pages, all of which point to three, related questions: Why do I so seldom read anything on how to DO predictive analytics or modeling from people who are always tweeting how these are (** Drum roll…
You know that guy, supposedly a program, in Tron, the one that yells, “I serve the user”. Well, he never met the first lead engineer I worked with. Reading Donald Farmer’s post “Is it really so?”, I was reminded of something that happened decades ago and it was a lesson I never forgot. I was…
The new year is a popular time for blogs to give lists of favorite books one read over the last year. Reading several of these posts did not inspire in me any desire to update my Amazon wish list. Novels really aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t care about any girls who knocked over…
The first course I ever took in statistics was in the math department, over thirty years ago, and Dr. Spitznagel, at Washington University in St. Louis taught me a good deal despite my best efforts, assisted by Fraternity Row, to major in partying (please don’t tell my mom). So, math people, thanks for that. HOWEVER…
Back in 1976, Howard Wainer published an article in Psychological Bulletin entitled, “Estimating linear coefficients in linear models: It don’t make no never mind.” Since I read this sometime in graduate school and I took my last statistics course in 1989, spending the rest of the time writing my dissertation, I believe I should win…
Today I was thinking about categorical modeling, I suppose other people were thinking about art, music, unicorns and bunnies, but they are not me. I was going to title this blog post “Modeling categorical data, Part 1) but two things occurred to me. The first is that no one would read a blog post named…
Las Vegas (twice), San Jose, Minneapolis, Seattle, Tunis Tunisia, Paris France, Washington DC (twice) , San Diego (lots), Santa Barbara (twice), Boston, St. Louis I know I am forgetting some places but that’s what they get for being forgettable. Regardless, for someone who was going to cut back on her travel I’ve traveled a lot…
A couple of nights ago, I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I couldn’t do math. I was having lunch with some colleagues and the bill was $24.82. Everyone handed me money and I had $25.67. I was trying to subtract the bill amount from what was in my hand and divide it by three,…
It’s the holidays and people are drifting in and out of the house. Apparently there is lots of sleeping over going on, although no one bothered to ask me. If you lived here when you were a kid and still have a key to the front door, you don’t need to ask. I can see…