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…
Photo from Nic Cubrilovic. Creative Commons license. Thanks, dude! It’s been 15-20 years since I was last a member of the American Statistical Association. I read an article in their journals occasionally but not much of it is relevant to me. I work with clients who are designing surveys, analyzing messy data and evaluating programs….
In a few (okay, a lot) of my previous posts I talked about how you could get set up with SAS On-Demand, problems you might have, programs to run. Now we get to the crux of the matter. Why? Let’s assume that you are like most professors in America and your students are like most…
The downward mobility of Ph.D. students is like domestic violence in many ways. That is, the people in the “family” all know it is a fact of life, but they don’t talk about it among themselves, and to outsiders they pretend it doesn’t exist. The fact is, far more people will graduate from Harvard than…
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…
In my analysis of data on the oldest old from the Kaiser Permanente study, I started with cigar smoking because I have a friend who turned 65 last month. His annual physical went like this: Doctor: Do you still smoke cigars? Jim: Yep. Doctor: Do you still drink 8 or 9 beers every night? Jim: Yep….
(Yes, that title does sound like a lot of the spam comments I get. ) Last year, at the Gov. 2.0 conference in Santa Monica, Jean Holm, from NASA spoke about some of the opportunities for open data. I left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the best examples she gave were, I thought,…
Before the semester began, I debated about requiring SAS on-demand for my statistics course. In fact, after giving it some thought, I decided to make use optional rather than mandatory. One reason for my hesitation was uncertainty about basing a major part of students’ grades on a project requiring an untested software package. I could…
It is not every day that my refrigerator provides insight into a statistical problem. My daughter gave me this magnet. BIRTHDAYS ARE GOOD FOR YOU. STATISTICS SHOW THAT PEOPLE WHO HAVE THE MOST BIRTHDAYS LIVE THE LONGEST. which led to my thoughts on life expectancy using open data. Kaiser Permanente collected data on two cohorts…
Continuing on with questions students asked at the end of the semester … Note that the following questions were asking what I personally do, and I answered the same way. These are not rules that anyone has to follow, like taking the square root of the variance to find the standard deviation, but they are,…