In three minutes before the next statistics session, here’s some more on the opening session last night. SAS Chief Marketing Officer Jim Davis made the comment that for every SAS product they are asking the question “Is there a mobile application for this and if so what does it look like?” He also showed some…
In the shower this morning, I was thinking about how seldom true longitudinal designs meet the assumption of sphericity. This is the point where one of my daughters always makes a comment about what other people think about in the shower. I don’t want to hear it. Sphericity is an assumption that all correlations among…
If you are the right age to have watched re-runs of the show on Nickelodeon, Clarissa Explains It All, then you are the age group today’s blog was written for. And don’t tell me the previous statement is grammatically incorrect. After having looked at these results, I’m already pissed off (note to self: don’t swear…
Hispanic, female, Ph.D. statistician who loves math. Hoo-wee, we hit the lottery! Let’s have her come talk to our inner city school children about STEM education. It’ll be SO uplifting. Ri-i-ight. (Oh, by the way, one million brownie points to the teacher who knew me but invited me anyway.) Given that the students are 12…
I was very thrilled to be invited to speak to six classes of seventh- and eighth-grade students at an urban school. Actually, they wanted me to speak to seven classes but there is no way on earth I am getting up at 6:30 a.m. or whatever ungodly hour would be required for me to make…
You know those people who have perfect theories about raising children and then they give birth to an actual child who (surprise, surprise) progresses from throwing up baby food on the cat to staying out after curfew? Well, the open data initiative seems to be like that. The people who are full of hype about…
Remember that old saying that 1,000,000 monkeys on a typewriter would eventually produce Shakespeare? After the equivalent of more than a 1,000,000 monkey-years of text published on the web, so far, no Shakespeare. (For a superb, in-depth discussion of this point, read Jason Lanier’s book, “You are not a gadget”) In very, very, brief, Lanier …
My favorite comic is the one where Dilbert is pointing to a number like 7,345,897 on a slide and saying that he did not have any real numbers so he just made some up because statistics show that numbers you make up are just as good as real ones. A member of the audience asks…
When I got married, I owned two houses. I sold both, using the money to pay off my other debts and pay for my daughters’ college. Even though everyone told us we were crazy not to do it, we didn’t buy another house. As my husband said, “Every house, every condo within miles of us…
If I were in charge of the world, which, sadly, I am not, there would be a requirement that every statistical programmer be issued a pearl like Glinda the Good had, (the good witch in the Oz books). Glinda’s pearl was white if you were telling the truth and black if you were lying. I’d…