Drinking and teaching statistics: Day 10 of the 20-day blogging challenge
There are multiple reasons that I haven’t gotten around to Day 10 of the 20-day blogging challenge. In part, because I have been really busy, and the other part is because I read this topic,
“Share ideas that your classroom uses for brain breaks and/or indoor recess”
and I thought
I got nothin’
Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I am NOT a very fun person. I like to think that I have some good qualities, but playfulness is not among them. Ph.D., world champion, founded/ co-founded a few companies, publishes scientific articles – does this sound like I spend a lot of time playing frisbee in the park? No, I didn’t think so. About the closest I come to this in class is on the first day having everyone introduce themselves and talk about their research interests – which is not really very close, I must admit.
For the last SAS assignment of the Public Health Research Methods course, I decided to make a video and upload it to youtube. For one of the dependent variables, I used how often in a year a person engaged in binge drinking, defined as 4 or more drinks per day. I’ve probably had four drinks in a day a few times in my LIFE so I was surprised to find that the average person (out of over 40,000), said they did this on average 2.4 times per year.
Today has been a really frustrating day. Yesterday, after a margarita at dinner, I came home and was working on our newest game, Fish Lake, and everything was progressing smoothly. Today, for both The Invisible Developer and I, it has been just beating our heads against the wall. For example, I have this PHP script that ran intermittently today – I have three records written to the database – and all of the rest of the times, it failed with an error. The I.D. has been having similar problems.
I took a break and made a video on how to do simple statistics with SAS to test the hypothesis that I could do a screen recording with Quicktime, write a program using SAS On-Demand in Firefox, record the audio in Garageband and drink Chardonnay all at the same time because Von’s had a half-price sale on wine over $20 a bottle and, well, you know – science.
You can determine if my hypothesis – whatever the hell it was – was supported. Bizarrely, the equals signs do not show up in the video. How weird is that?