Last year, I went from teaching in classrooms in a pretty building with a library on the ground floor to teaching on-line. I also went from the semester system to teaching the same content in four weeks. This has led curious friends of mine, used to teaching in the traditional format, to ask , How…
SAS Enterprise Miner – Free, on a Mac – Bet You Didn’t See That Coming … but how the hell do you get your data on it? I wanted to test SAS Text Miner and was surprised to find the university did not have a license. No problem – and it really was, astoundingly, no…
Am I missing something here? All of the macros I have seen for the parallel analysis criterion for factor analysis look pretty complicated, but, unless I am missing something, it is a simple deal. The presumption is this: There isn’t a number like a t-value or F-value to use to test if an eigenvalue is…
I’m about to tear my hair out. I’ve been reading this statistics textbook which shall remain nameless, ostensibly a book for graduate students in computer science, engineering and similar subjects. The presumption is that at the end of the course students will be able to compute and interpret a factor analysis, MANOVA and other multivariate…
I’ve written here before about visual literacy and Cook’s D is just my latest example. Most people intuitively understand that any sample can have outliers, say, an 80-year-old man who is the father of a six-year-old child, the new college graduate who is making $150,000 a year. We understand that those people may throw off…
Since it is the weekend, I decided to blog about weekend stuff. Look for more statistics tomorrow. For most of the past quarter-century, I have been roped into being a volunteer for one organization or another. Here is a very, very partial list: American Association on Mental Retardation National Council on Family Relations United States…
Ever wonder why with goodness of fit tests non- significance is what you want? Why is that sometimes when you have a significant p-value it means your hypothesis is correct, there is a relationship between the price of honey and the number of bees, and in other cases, significance means your model is rejected? Well,…
I was reading a book on PHP just to get some ideas for a re-design I’m doing for a client, when I thought of this. Although I think of PHP as something you use to put stuff into a database and take it out – data entry of client records, reports of total sales –…
I’ve been looking high and low for a supplemental text for a course on multivariate statistics and I found this one – The Multivariate Social Scientist, by Graeme Hutcheson 7 Nick Sofroniou They are big proponents of generalized linear models, in fact, the subtitle is “Introductory statistics using generalized linear models”, so if you don’t…
I find it weird when I make people nervous. I’ve had people shake and stutter so much that I thought they had some sort of disability, only to find out later that it was a reaction to meeting me! My family and friends say I’m intimidating, which I also find bizarre. I am, literally, a…