Lately, I’ve been working on a report that uses eight datasets that all have the same problems with the usernames. In addition to needing to remove every username that contained the word “test” or “intern” we also needed to delete specific names of the classroom teachers who had played the game. We needed to correct…
A few years ago, I was at the Western Uses of SAS Software conference and renowned statistician Stanley Azen played the piano and sang at the closing ceremony. Briefly, very briefly, I considered beginning my presentation on 10 SAS steps to an annual report, by writing a song, These are a few of my favorite PROCs,…
Finishing up my second paper for WUSS next month and I have been thinking about the usefulness of character functions in a world where it sometimes seems like everyone is just put on this earth to irritate the hell out of me. Take this problem, for example, In analyzing the data for our games, we…
The second time I taught statistics, I supplemented the textbook with assignments using real data, and I have been doing it in the twenty-eight years since. The benefits seem so obvious to me that it’s hard to believe that everyone doesn’t do the same. The only explanation I can imagine is that they are not…
Hint: It’s math! My last post, I ranted about the need for math if you are going to learn to code. I was thinking about that again today. Unity is the game engine that claims to be used by over a million developers. That may be true – it seems like everyone I ran into…
I’ve spent a good bit of my life living and working in places that many of my colleagues would not drive through in the middle of the day with the windows rolled up and the car doors locked, so you’ll have to excuse me if I am a bit cynical about the latest push to…
Visual literacy, being the word chooser of this blog, I have decided means the ability to “read” graphic information. A post I saw today on Facebook earnings over time gave a prime example of this. If you are a fluent “visualizer”, then just like a fluent reader can read a paragraph and comprehend it,…
If I had a clone, all of my code would be beautiful. Last week, I was a speaker at the Tribal Disability Conference in Turtle Mountain, where I spoke on starting a business. Then, I went for a site visit at Spirit Lake Vocational Rehabilitation followed by another talk on self-employment at the Tribal Disability…
When we started the Dakota Learning Project to evaluate our educational games, I wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew. We proposed to develop the games, pilot them in schools, collect data and analyze the data to see if the games had any impact. We were also going to go back…
Here is a little note for people on customer service: Every company I have ever worked with that has terrible customer service apologizes a lot and makes soothing noises in lieu of actually doing anything. When your company fucks up it does NO good to say how sorry you are and you empathize. I really…