The General Linear Model is general (also linear and a model, but that is another topic). What is general about it? What does it do? One way to try to understand a statistic is by the underlying mathematics. I read a paper today where most of it was written in Greek. Seriously. There were a…
Here’s a clever idea — Let’s say you want to predict who dies within the next year (I bet you are a lot of fun at parties). Moreover, you have a hypothesis to test that married people are less likely to die than single people. There are a number of factors that relate to both…
When I read textbooks, whether in mathematics or other fields, these are usually as boring as watching a light bulb flicker. Searching the Internet for Algebra problems can get to be pretty depressing. (Whether someone who spends her spare time looking for Algebra problems might already have mental health issues is a separate question not…
I was reading a book this week, Mathematics for the Intelligent Non-mathematician. If it was a person, this book would be your grandmother, not terribly exciting but pleasant to spend time with and if you paid attention you were likely to learn something. Since I use mathematics for my living, you might reasonably wonder why…
Silence is one of the most under-used teaching techniques. As Julia learns mathematics, I notice major differences in the way my husband and I respond to her. After I ask her a question, I wait for an answer. The period at the end of that sentence is deliberate. I don’t do anything else. I don’t…
Out of all the thousands of pages of all of the textbooks you ever read in your life, how many sentences can you remember? One that has remained with me for over twenty years was in the required book for my inferential statistics course, “If something exists, it must exist in some quantity and that…
Ten years of graduate school, two masters degrees, one doctorate and there are four statements that still stand out decades later. Dr. Irv Balow, our research methods professor had just been asked by a frustrated student, “It seems like every time we ask you a question, the answer is always, ‘The data don’t support that…
Today I am on my soapbox. These are words to the wise for working people everywhere, but especially to a certain generation – mine – and to a certain gender – women. If “getting the job done” requires that you work 70 hours a week while other people work 40, then the solution is that…
It is has become increasingly evident that there is not an IQ cut-off for being allowed to post on the Internet. I wrote about this a while back in my personal blog, suggesting that if you would not tell 30,000 people individually how drunk you were last night and what you tried to do to…
In the middle of writing a final project report from my old company, I read an interesting article by Walter Kirn on multi-tasking. According to the author, who cites actual science as evidence, we are all becoming progressively dumber due to doing two or three things at once. While talking on the cell phone, we…