“I teach statistics to people who don’t want to learn it.” This is my cocktail party response to people who ask what I do for a living. Even though I usually only teach one course a year, it is a quick way to answer the question and get back to drinking. Having faced up to…
Go to your local users group. If you don’t know if you have a local users group in your area, check the sascommunity.org page that lists bunches of them. There are six in California listed on their site and I heard of two others that started very recently that aren’t listed. LABSUG is the Los…
More about the Los Angeles Basin SAS Users Group (LABSUG) later, but I did want to mention one tangential point from the first presentation. It was on the Graphics Template Language (GTL). The first example was pretty cool, looking at the population pyramid by gender and year for the United States, then for Qatar at…
In fantasy land and fairy tales, there is this thing called equivalent groups. People are randomly assigned to a control group and a treatment group. Everyone in the treatment group receives the same treatment, for example, being sprinkled with exactly three teaspoons of fairy dust, and everyone in the control group does not….
Thank you, God, for St. Mary’s Catholic School, where someone back in the 1960’s decided that a speed-reading machine and programmed learning was a good idea. My father used to say that if they put words on toilet paper, I’d read it. I still read six or seven books a week, selected pretty much at…
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…
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,…
According to my partner, Dr. Erich Longie, the Dakota believe that how one acts immediately after the death of a loved one, is how a person will act for the rest of his/her life. Thus, when someone dies, it is a very bad idea to get drunk, sleep around or other dysfunctional ways of dealing…
Here is a math problem: Hoksinato and Tasunka Ska are going to steal horses. They could steal the scrub ponies from the edge of the camp. The last 15 times warriors from the tribe tried to steal scrub ponies, they got away 12 times and were caught and tortured 3 times. If they…
Lots of random people give me advice. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because: I really do try very hard to listen to other people openly and, I go out of my way to meet new people. Neither of these traits come naturally to me and I have to put a lot of effort into…