I’d always found the SPSS help pretty basic, so I don’t even consider it when looking for information. However, courtesy of the UCLA Academic Computing Group, which has a bunch of the SPSS case studies on-line, I found this one on mixed models. It really is one of the most straight-forward explanations of mixed models,…
Generally, when the school principal calls, it’s not a good sign. When the call begins, “I’m sure you weren’t expecting this …” … it’s usually an even worse sign. In this case, however, he had called to say that The Spoiled One was being recommended for a scholarship to a boarding school. We had never…
Want to start a business? Think you’re a good programmer? Have a good design? (By a good design, I don’t mean an idea, I mean pages of scene, character and action description if it’s a game, plus – well, let’s just say one HELL of a lot more than “there should be an app for…
There are some things to like about Statistica. The scatter plot matrix, for one. I’d done a sentiment analysis of a data set on blog posts (not mine). For each post, I had three variables number of negative sentiments expressed in the post, number of positive sentiments expressed in the post total number of comments…
The advantage of learning a new language is it sometimes makes you re-think the old languages you know. For example, here is a problem that happens often: Some people are morons. For example, say I were to ask you the following question: “How old are you?” YOU would probably answer something like, 42 or 21….
There is a huge inequality in the way the economy has played out among people I know. Business is good and has been getting better all year for me. My friend Jake is doing great. He was an anesthesiologist and several years ago became board-certified in geriatrics. He loves working with older people and his…
So I say, “There may be some useful information in the text fields. For example, people who use credit to buy commodities, such as meat may differ from people who buy finished goods like clothing who may differ from people who purchase machinery on credit. Perhaps you may want to consider some kind of clustering.”…
No, this is not a post about politics or life-hacking, although the same title could apply in either case. I am talking about statistical power. People often ask me what the power of a test is, but the problem is that they are asking the wrong question. Power is not a single number. I understand…
In the past, when I had to do any type of parsing of text, I wrote my own code with a zillion SUBSTR functions and IF statements and it did the job but it was *so-o-o ugly and painful that I never even considered including text mining in any courses I taught. I looked into…
Being sick with only half of my brain cells functioning, I spent the weekend reading random articles on some of my favorite sites. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find one had the stock title: “Do you want to start your own business, escaping the cubicle, be the next Mark Zuckerberg, do you have…