I read an interesting question years ago, on the JMP blog, “What are 5-9 software packages you can’t live without?” That reminded me that when I started this blog almost four years ago, I wrote a post with the title “Nine software packages I can’t live without” . I never finished publishing the list, I started another list…
Last week, teaching my statistics class, I gave an example of regression using actual data. I had hypothesized that given the greater discrimination and poverty on the reservation 40 or 50 years ago, there would be a negative relationship between age and educational attainment within the adult population. That is, people over 60 would be…
I decided about a year ago that it was time to write an educational game to teach math. None of the languages I knew were an optimal choice for this. I’d been programming in SAS for 30 years and it’s an excellent choice for processing the data that come in from pre-tests, student answers and…
We shipped. Again. It was not everything I wanted to go into version 1.1 but we had four days to get it installed on all of the computers being used at our test site and one of those days was being taken by FedEx to get our flash drive to North Dakota and the other…
Not a day goes by that I don’t read an article saying I don’t exist. Apparently, there are no women actually running start-ups, no Latinos in technology. No one outside of Silicon Valley is doing anything. Maybe I’m a unicorn. Or perhaps I’m invisible. If I were to actually exist, and if it was possible…
I’m never going to understand the idea that start-ups are for young people. It is like the ads you see where people want a 25-year-old with 15 years of experience, you know, “Expert in C++, systems administration, Linux, Windows, SAS, R, Hadoop, Ruby, Python and Java. Must have 5-plus years experience in development for mobile…
Hey, kids, wanna come over after school and study math? The two students we gave this tempting offer stayed until the office closed and we had to leave. It’s been like that all week. This is what kids playing our new math game look like. I would insert a video but it is not so…
Twenty-eight years ago, I won the world judo championships. Unlike almost everyone else who accomplishes that feat, I did NOT go into running a judo school, selling martial arts supplies, or, more recently, mixed martial arts. Photo courtesy of Hans Gutknecht of the Los Angeles Daily News On the contrary, I immediately went into a…
Okay, young people, the time has come for us to have a serious discussion. When I was young, I was very annoying. Now that I am old, I am frequently annoyed, proving thereby that God has a sense of humor. I think pretty often the people who are annoying me are not doing so deliberately….
My long-time business partner, Dr. Erich Longie, is a very experienced pool player. Today, we were discussing a business decision where someone had to choose between two potential employees. One was exceptionally talented but not particularly ethical – nothing terrible, mind you, like stealing out of the cash register, or sexually harassing the interns –…