Statisticians are good at lots of things but naming is not one of them. If Carl Linnaeus had been a statistician the name for camel would be Horse With Hump and for elephant Really Big Horse with Nose based on the fact that both have four legs and people ride them. Such is the case…
If I had time, which I don’t, I would start a series of how-to articles for statistical software and copy the Car Talk scale they use as a guide for whether or not you should attempt a job yourself, from a. There are two kinds of screwdrivers ? to e. I have built a working…
In my copious spare time, of which I have none, I occasionally get the urge to actually read technical books from beginning to end. I think my life took the path of most grown-ups in my field. You get a degree, or two or three or four. Perhaps during the course of that, but certainly…
On my way back from Tunisia via Paris I ended up in a redneck dive bar somewhere in Georgia reading the New York Times on my Kindle while the lady next to me asked the very drunk waitress if she knew who had won at NASCAR this weekend. This sounds like the beginning of a…
Normally, walking along the beach in the morning with my daughter, I do not expect a random person to come up to us with the question, “Would you like to ride my camel?” However, I was not taken nearly as much by surprise as my daughter because I had been to this same beach twice…
I had the pleasure of attending a lecture Rand Wilcox gave on the state of research. He was far more amusing than I expected from a statistician (perhaps this reflects low self-esteem on my part). He made the very valid point that all statisticians learn in the infancy of their careers that the general linear…
I have been trying to get ready for two workshops this summer. One is called Visual Data with SPSS (pretty obvious what it is about). The second one is statistics using SAS Enterprise Guide. I was going to call the first course Statistics without Numbers and the second one Statistics without Programming. A colleague pointed…
I failed art in junior high school. When I tell people that, people who actually have artistic talent, they look at me in disbelief and say, “No one fails art. That’s one of the great things about art. How could you possibly fail art?” The answer is that I was very, very bad at it….
Being a professor can build humility. About twenty years ago, I was teaching the third course in the statistics sequence required of all graduate students. The second course had been taught by an adjunct professor, which was FAR less common then than it is now (that’s a whole different post). The first day I started…
Cluster analysis is one of those techniques I don’t get to use very often. About once every couple of years someone will be doing a study of types of companies, patients or clients and have a need for a cluster analysis. The best description I read of cluster analysis came from a book many years…