A few years ago, when I was at USC, I tried to get a desktop version of Enterprise Miner to run on a virtual machine on my Mac and that never happened, although I did get it working on a Windows machine I had at home. Last week, I wrote about my failed attempt to…
I picked up Guy Kawasaki’s book, Reality Check and was immediately turned off by his assertion that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy like nowhere else on earth, that it doesn’t matter what school you attended, how much money your parents have, as long as you can code. A few pages later, he quotes approvingly a venture…
A couple of days ago, I ended my post with If you have a 25% probability of a job developing into something better, and you consistently have a job for years because you have no choice, then the odds are in your favor that you will eventually improve your situation unless … but that’s my…
New semester coming up when I will be teaching data mining. Because I never do anything at the last minute, I’m registering my course and testing the SAS on-demand for Enterprise Miner now. I have learned from experience not to ignore it when the instructions say to check your configuration. You should find how to…
A friend of mine commented on one of his young employees as, “The worst combination you can get – someone who isn’t interested in the work and doesn’t need the money.” There are lots of advantages of being born into a well-off family. Your family can provide you introductions to get your first job. You…
I was asked to comment on how my use of social media contributed to my career as a statistician and since, either a. It was too good to not post b. I was too tired from the four presentations I had to do this week plus taking my grandchildren to Disneyland to come up with an…
During the time since I started this series of posts on a little thing I knocked out one evening to illustrate long division, I’ve probably done a dozen other somewhat interesting pieces of code – I am sad that Java has co-opted the use of the word codelet because it is such a nice term for…
Life is not a junior high school dance. I get so tired of people who say they want to do something but won’t step up. I was going to use “women” in that last sentence but then I realized that some of the people who drive me craziest in this regard are men. Whether it is…
At one time, I avoided learning CSS because it seemed like that was a “woman thing” and in my career, I have noted that if you are in a primarily female field you get paid less money and people give you more shit than in predominantly female fields – thus, construction workers make more than…
I read an interesting post by Heidi Roizen with the title, “It’s different for girls.” Ms. Roizen is an admirable person. A successful entrepreneur, venture capitalist and mother. (The latter is relevant as you’ll find if you read her post) This is a quote from her post: Wine was brought and toasts were made to…