It’s been almost two weeks of reviewing textbooks, revising my syllabus and I have to go back to it in a couple of hours to edit my last few powerpoints before class starts. Yes, when I was a brand-new baby professor I was sometimes rushing to write a lecture before class, but now that I…
Perhaps you have watched the Socrata videos on how to do data visualization with government data sets and it is still not working for you. Here is a step by step example of answering a simple question. Is the prevalence of alcohol use among youth higher in rural states than urban ones? You can…
On my way home from the 2014 Western Users of SAS Software conference. When I was younger, I would go to every basic session trying to find something I could use that wasn’t over my head. As I got older, I went to the statistics sessions to see if there was anything new or more…
As I mentioned yesterday, banging away at 7 Generation Games has led to less time for blogging and a whole pile of half-written posts shoved into cubbyholes of my brain. So, today, I reached into the random file and coincidentally came out with a second post on open data … The question for Day 11…
The Mplus website has free videos on using Mplus. The introductory course (not very introductory, really, because the the main topics are advanced factor analysis and structural equation modeling) has some pretty good resources. While it is not professional quality – just a video of a class – and much of it is beyond the…
In my copious spare time, of which I have none, I teach in the doctoral program at a nearby university. They want me to use the library and keep up on research, both because it looks nice in the alumni newsletter and also so that when students ask me questions about current technologies or findings,…
(If you are too young to remember the song, “Money for nothing and your chicks for free”, I guess the title of this post is not nearly as amusing to you as it was to me, as my lovely daughter so unhelpfully pointed out.) Since I whined yesterday about Codecademy not providing much explanation of…
I am pissed. As a small business owner, I am feeling very, very disappointed that there is certainly some law out there that would impose penalties if I drove on over to Riverside County and bitch-slapped Darrell Issa. I’ve grown cynical enough in my old age and after having run a small business since 1985…
I’ve spent about 35 years messing around with computers based on the assumption that most discoveries are not preceded by “Eureka!” but rather, “What the hell! May as well try it.” Having my new computer pretty much dissolve in smoke (less than a month after I bought it!), I decided to continue my analyses of…
When I met my second husband, the entire contents of his kitchen cupboards was a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a loaded Magnum revolver. Despite that, he was extremely healthy. His reasoning was that he was a big, tough guy while viruses and bacteria were little bitty things, so…