Occasionally, a brave student will ask me, When will I ever use this? The “this” can be anything from a mixed model analysis to nested arrays. (I have answers for both of those, by the way.) I NEVER get that question when discussing topics like filtering data, whether for records or variables, because it is…
Since it’s the 4th of July, I figure no one is very work-focused today and it would be a good time for one of my occasional rants. I read a book this week, The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf. It was a good story for a lots of reasons, a primary one being that it…
In the last post, I used SAS Enterprise Guide to filter out a couple of ‘bad’ records that came from test data, then I created a summary table of the number of questions answered and the percentage correct. Then, I calculated the mean percentage correct for the around 84%. That seemed a bit high to me….
The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village…
It’s been a good week for the darling daughters. The Spoiled One graduated summa cum laude, also president of the senior class, and is heading to the east coast to attend a small liberal arts college where she has an academic scholarship and a spot on the soccer team. The book co-authored by Darling Daughter…
Where we left off, I had created some parcels and was going to do a factor analysis later. Now, it’s later. If you’ll recall, I had not find any items that correlated significantly with the food item that also made sense conceptually. For example, it correlated highly with attending church services but that didn’t really…
First of all, what are parcels? Not the little packages your grandma left on the table in the hall when she came back from shopping. Well, not only that. In factor analysis, parcels are simply the sum of a small number of items. I prefer using parcels when possible because both basic psychometric theory and…
Someone handed me a data set on acculturation that they had collected from a small sample size of 25 people. There was a good reason that the sample was small – think African-American presidents of companies over $100 million in sales or Latina neurosurgeons. Anyway, small sample, can’t reasonably expect to get 500 or 1,000…
In a very random life event, I was asked a lot of questions recently by people exploring making a movie about my life. This is not the interesting part, because in Hollywood people are always talking about making movies that come to nothing … The interesting thing was how many times the answer to a…
Since I already called my mom on Mother’s Day, I thought that I’d talk about another woman who was important in my life, a mentor, who I probably haven’t talked to in 20 years. (I know, I’m such an ungrateful bitch. ) Dr. Jane Mercer was not even in the same department as me. My dissertation was…