The first cool thing you should know about Dr. Patricia Berglund is that she and several others put their slides and more up at the SAS Global Forum take-out section. That is NOT, contrary to what you might believe, a place where you can pick up some really good Chinese food to eat while listening…
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…
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…
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,…
The difference between working for a business and being at a university is in a business we’re not paying you to show us how smart you are. Don’t get me wrong. I think the best career advice I ever read was in an article by James Watson in Technology Review, never be the brightest person…
There are two kinds of people in organizations; those who can count and those who claim to have “people skills”. When David Wechsler created the most commonly used intelligence test in America, the results gave two IQ scores, Verbal and Performance Intelligence. Dr. Wechsler said he had noticed that there are some people who were…
In my copious spare time, of which I have none, I occasionally get the urge to actually read technical books from beginning to end. I think my life took the path of most grown-ups in my field. You get a degree, or two or three or four. Perhaps during the course of that, but certainly…