My mother-in-law suspects that her granddaughter is being raised with no adult supervision whatsoever. Her suspicions are correct. This year, The World’s Most Spoiled 14-year-old (she had a birthday this week) is learning physics. The rocket scientist has multiple degrees in physics. The stage would seem to be set for positive developments in science learning. Two…
Performance evaluations are nobody’s favorite experience, with the possible exception of a small population of masochists. However, I did enjoy one from a department chair who began, Unlike most new Ph.D. ‘s who believe that they are smarter than God, AnnMaria …. My assumption of less-than-omniscience began with my graduation from the University of Minnesota…
Programming is NOT mostly about writing code. It’s mostly about figuring out how to solve a problem. Here is an example from yesterday…. HOW TO SCORE QUESTIONS WHEN THE ANSWERS ARE IN MULTIPLE VARIABLES I downloaded an SPSS file from surveymonkey which a client had used to collect data. I then output that as a…
Heidi Cohen gives a lot of good advice on getting your blog noticed, very little of which I follow. For one thing, she does not begin by suggesting you have someone bring you a glass of cognac, which is how this particular post started, proving that she may know more about blogging but I’m a…
A few years ago, taking testimony in a court case, an attorney asked me, “Tell me, doctor, have you heard the saying, ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’? Isn’t it true what they say, that you can lie with statistics?” I answered, “Not to me, you can’t.” My point that day was that if the person…
Every day, I get email asking me if I am interested in some affiliate program, link exchange, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, these people do not read my blog because I personally would question the wisdom of affiliating oneself with a person who has called a congressman a lying ass mother-fucker (I was right, too) and…
It’s not often that you read a paragraph and it sticks in your mind for months. That this particular paragraph came not from some great literary work but rather from the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Association of Small Computer Users in Education is even more expected, but there it is. Douglas Kranch…
I have a confession to make. As a sixteen-year-old college freshman, I had no idea what people in business did. As a nineteen-year-old college graduate, with a BSBA, I didn’t know much more. My more affluent classmates had internships in the summer. My scholarship covered my tuition and sometimes room and board but left a…
Recently, I had the need to write the exact same programs twice, once using SAS and once using SPSS syntax. Even though these aren’t the same language, having done it once made it much easier to do it the second time. Let’s start with quintile matching. I’ve been rambling on about propensity scores lately and…
My initial exposure to Occam’s razor came in my first undergraduate economics class. Perhaps due to my tender years, it made a great impression, and I have tried to apply it ever since. In short, Occam’s razor advises us when presented with competing, plausible choices, the…