or why, despite shootings in Tuscon, terrorism by the Taliban, the expanding concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 1% of Americans, the implosion of Detroit and every movie Michael Moore ever made, I still remain hopeful. I was depressed this week, until I remembered The Black Swan and Volcano. The otherwise forgettable…
All my programs are working today and I am sad. Fortunately for everyone else, but unfortunately for me today, SAS has increasingly automated or semi-automated fixing those errors. It’s unfortunate for me because I wanted to talk about errors and how to fix these. I could create a simulation dataset but I hate doing that….
I really did not have time to write this today, but two articles I read made me drop what I was doing. First was the Wall Street Journal article by a Yale law professor who says Chinese mothers are superior because they produce more mathematical and musical prodigies. The reason, she says, is because none…
Today, I commented to one of my daughters that I was examining residuals. She asked if that was a kind of insect, like a termite. I told her no, but they still were bugging me. To a statistician, all of the variance in the world is divided into two groups, variance you can explain and…
I’m on Twitter a lot, and more to the point, I read a whole lot of blogs and web pages, all of which point to three, related questions: Why do I so seldom read anything on how to DO predictive analytics or modeling from people who are always tweeting how these are (** Drum roll…
You know that guy, supposedly a program, in Tron, the one that yells, “I serve the user”. Well, he never met the first lead engineer I worked with. Reading Donald Farmer’s post “Is it really so?”, I was reminded of something that happened decades ago and it was a lesson I never forgot. I was…
The new year is a popular time for blogs to give lists of favorite books one read over the last year. Reading several of these posts did not inspire in me any desire to update my Amazon wish list. Novels really aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t care about any girls who knocked over…
The first course I ever took in statistics was in the math department, over thirty years ago, and Dr. Spitznagel, at Washington University in St. Louis taught me a good deal despite my best efforts, assisted by Fraternity Row, to major in partying (please don’t tell my mom). So, math people, thanks for that. HOWEVER…
Back in 1976, Howard Wainer published an article in Psychological Bulletin entitled, “Estimating linear coefficients in linear models: It don’t make no never mind.” Since I read this sometime in graduate school and I took my last statistics course in 1989, spending the rest of the time writing my dissertation, I believe I should win…
Today I was thinking about categorical modeling, I suppose other people were thinking about art, music, unicorns and bunnies, but they are not me. I was going to title this blog post “Modeling categorical data, Part 1) but two things occurred to me. The first is that no one would read a blog post named…