People often ask me how I get so much done. Over and over, I have found one of the simplest ways to increase productivity is by not reading my email in the morning. Some days, I don’t get around to reading it at all. This evening, when I finally opened my email, I had over…
It seems as if parents can do no right. Parents who are very involved, who coach their children’s sports teams, who insist that their child not skip practice are criticized for living through their children. However, as every Disney after-school special ever will tell you, God save the child whose parent has an actual job…
I’m in the middle of data preparation on a research project on games to teach fractions. This is the part of a data analysis project that takes up 80% of the time. Fortunately, PROC FREQ from SAS can simplify things. 1. How many unique records ? There are multiple quizzes in the game, and you…
I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite when it comes to documentation. In every staff meeting, I emphasize documenting whatever code you have written that week, but I always put off doing it myself. My excuse is always that it isn’t final and when I get the complete project done I will put it in the wiki….
Everyone should pause every now and then and ask themselves this question: What would you want to be doing if you weren’t doing this? Whatever “this” is, your answer will be revealing. If you excitedly exclaim, “I would start a restaurant, using my grandma’s recipes, but it would be more of a modern look –…
The heroine in Labyrinth (fun movie, by the way) complains , “That’s not fair!” and the Goblin King responds, “You say that so often. I wonder what your standard of comparison is.” Sunday evening and I’m taking a break from working on our latest game to offer another installment in Mama AnnMaria’s Guide on Not…
In the past, I have questioned the extent to which we really suck at math in the U.S. While I’m still a bit skeptical that the average child in developing countries is doing dramatically better than children in the U.S., one thing is pretty clear from our results to date, and that is that the…
Sometimes, you can know too much programming for your own good. Yesterday, I was working on analyzing a data set and can I just say here that SAS’s inability to handle mixed-type arrays is the bane of my existence. (In case you don’t know, if you mix character and numeric variable types in an array,…
I tell clients on our statistical consulting side all of the time that if your conclusion is only valid if you look at this specific subset of your sample, with this particular statistical technique. You need to look for a convergence or results. Does the mean score increase? Does the proportion of people passing a…
I’m preparing a data set for analysis and since the data are scored by SAS I am double-checking to make sure that I coded it correctly. One check is to select out an item and compare the percentage who answered correctly with the mean score for that item. These should be equal since items are…