Let’s get this out right up front – I have no question that there is discrimination in the tech industry. I gave an hour-long talk on this very subject at MIT a couple of weeks ago, where I pointed out that everyone’s first draft of pretty much everything is crap – your first game, first…
I quit keeping track of how much money all the grants I have written totaled, but when we were doing a lot of work together, Dr. Erich Longie had it at $30 million, and it’s been several years and probably another $4- 5 million since then. If you are interested in obtaining grant money, let…
I’m just sitting here in Boston airport waiting to catch the bus to Rhode Island. For some reason, the WordPress app on my iPad doesn’t want to upload the images I downloaded from my phone. This is the sort of thing I would often get upset about. I also have several emails to answer…
Do you really need to document everything? Those who say that there is no such thing as a stupid question might be reconsidering their position right about now. Of course we need to document everything! Perhaps my reluctance stems from my hatred of technical writers. If you are a tech writer and are a decent…
I went to the Western Users of SAS Software conference last week and came home sad. It wasn’t for the reasons you’d guess. No one sexually harassed me (as if!). I did not forget how to code a confirmatory factor analysis in the middle of the pre-conference class I was teaching. The other statisticians didn’t…
You wouldn’t think there would be that much to say about scree plots. That is because you are like me and sometimes wrong. The problem I often have teaching is that I assume people know a lot more than is reasonable to expect for someone coming into a course. Sometimes, I’m like a toddler who…
I find this scree plot of eigenvalues very helpful in identifying the number of factors. A scree plot is a plot of the eigenvalues by the factor number. I realized this is only helpful if one understands what an eigenvalue is. First of all, go way back to Stat 101 & remember that correlation is…
Start-ups are all about buzzwords – innovation! disrupt! billion! We’re going to disrupt the something something something with our innovation that will bring us a billion dollars! Hurray! VCs , give me money! That all sounds really good until it’s you that’s being disrupted. We’re part of the Boom Startup Ed Tech accelerator for twelve…
I certainly understand how you could think that all CEOs are rude and all investors are assholes but it’s really not quite that simple. This occurred to me today as for the 4th (or was it 5th?) time in a row, I told someone talking to me that I had to go because I had…
First, the big, exciting news, if you have not heard it – we are one of EIGHT COMPANIES IN THE WORLD selected to be part of the Boom Startup Accelerator for Educational Technology. Can you tell that I’m super-excited about this? At lunch today, for the second time in two days, someone asked me what…