Today was my most recent experience in the clash of commercial and academic cultures. For seven years, I was an assistant and then associate professor, teaching statistics and research methods, writing articles for academic journals. For five years before that, I was a graduate student at the University of California. I even did a post-doc…
I was reading the powerpoints that came with a textbook, you know, in the instructor’s packet, and I was already thinking this book was a little more focused on computation over comprehension for my liking when I came to the following learning objective: “Compute an Analysis of Variance by hand.” Are you fucking kidding me?…
It’s that time of year again when we hear complaints about how terrible the U.S. is doing in math. This article by The Atlantic with the title American Schools vs. the World: Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math is just one of many, many reports that showed up in my twitter stream. The first question anyone…
One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How do you get so much done?” I sometimes think that growing up without advantages can be an advantage. For example, when I was a kid, I never had my own room. I always shared it with my sister, or sometimes my sister and my…
This month, I’m teaching biostatistics for National University, and so far I am really enjoying it. There is just a really minor problem, though. While I received a copy of the textbook, I did not receive a copy of the instructor’s manual with answers to the homework problems. Since I am going to grade 20…
After a fine, productive evening of coding PHP and javascript respectively, The Invisible Developer and I were discussing how to find a developer. We’re making good progress on 7 Generation Games and we’re pretty happy coding our own stunts. We did have someone come in to pinch hit last year when we were running behind…
I was wrong. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that women did CSS and HTML and men did “real” coding like PHP, SQL, Python, Perl, javascript etc. Since life had taught me that predominantly male fields always paid better than female ones (construction workers get paid more than licensed practical nurses, for example),…
I’ve written about the challenges of finding a mentor previously, Why the cool kids won’t hang out with you. Let’s be frank, if you are old and pumping gas, not too many people are interested in you as a mentor, but the last few years have been good here at The Julia Group, and the…
I’m looking forward to teaching my first masters level course in a lo-o-ng time next week. Since this may be the first course students take in their masters program, the question I’m faced with is, “What would you tell someone at the very beginning of learning about statistics?” I’m starting with this: Bias = bad…
I am old. I remember punched cards, COBOL, dumb terminals and having to walk over to the computer center and load tapes on to the drive if I wanted to use large data sets – large back then meaning 100,000 records or more with a few hundred variables. We thought that was pretty big data….