How to solve any (statistics) problem: Part 3, proportions

Last month, I wrote about the steps to solving any statistics problem. A Pew Research Poll asked 1,201 adults “All in all, do you think affirmative action programs designed to increase the number of black and other minority students on campus are a good thing or a bad thing? Sixty percent said good, 30% said…

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How to do a regression analysis with SAS web editor and SAS Enterprise Guide

Here we have analysis of open data using free software with – uh, SAS? Click the links below and watch the videos. Seriously. They are too large to embed in the post. Sorry. Yes, you might think of SAS as the choice of multinational corporations with unlimited software budgets. You now have two options, if…

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The Benefits of Growing Your Own: The view from the code monkey cage

Last week, I wrote about my disagreement with those who want to go out and hire a code monkey. Being deeply immersed in writing a computer game to teach kids math, here is my perspective from the monkey cage on the benefits of coding your own stunts. I like it. This seems to be a…

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Significance:The magazine – and why you should join ASA

I admit that some months I am so busy that I toss Significance out without reading it – this is the magazine of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and Royal Statistical Society. No, I don’t pile up things to read later because I never do read them later. Anyway … taking two days off work,…

Native Americans: Why Heidi Heitkamp won & Nate Silver was wrong?

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been hearing my friends from Turtle Mountain and Spirit Lake talk about the election in North Dakota. I was particularly interested because this was the one election that Nate Silver predicted incorrectly. He had Heitkamp down by 3.9 percent, and yet she won. I have no idea how Silver’s…