you can make anything into an opportunity. For example today I had this very unpleasant operation on my phone actually that was my thumb not my phone. as you may have guessed comma I am now writing using a piece of voice recognition software. It’s a Google Chrome extension. this makes me happy for two…
A picture says 1,000 words – especially if you are talking to a non-technical audience. Take the example below. We wanted to know whether the students who played our game Fish Lake at least through the first math problem and the students who gave up at the first sight of math differed in achievement. Maybe…
Hey, boys and girls, it’s that time again, for another episode of Mama AnnMaria’s Guide on How not to Get Your Sorry Ass Fired. Lately, I’ve run into a few people who think they are getting away with something because they are SO smart. (Hint: You’re not. I wrote about this months ago. You should…
If I were to give one piece of advice to a would-be program evaluator, it would be to get to know your data so intimately it’s almost immoral. Generally, program evaluation is an activity undertaken by someone with a degree of expertise in research methods and statistics (hopefully!) using data gathered and entered by people’s…
At the Western Users of SAS Software conference (yes, they DO know that is WUSS), I’ll be speaking about using SAS for evaluation. “If the results bear any relationship at all to reality, it is indeed a fortunate coincidence.” I first read that in a review of research on expectancy effects, but I think it…
Occasionally, a brave student will ask me, When will I ever use this? The “this” can be anything from a mixed model analysis to nested arrays. (I have answers for both of those, by the way.) I NEVER get that question when discussing topics like filtering data, whether for records or variables, because it is…
Since it’s the 4th of July, I figure no one is very work-focused today and it would be a good time for one of my occasional rants. I read a book this week, The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf. It was a good story for a lots of reasons, a primary one being that it…
In the last post, I used SAS Enterprise Guide to filter out a couple of ‘bad’ records that came from test data, then I created a summary table of the number of questions answered and the percentage correct. Then, I calculated the mean percentage correct for the around 84%. That seemed a bit high to me….
The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village…
It’s been a good week for the darling daughters. The Spoiled One graduated summa cum laude, also president of the senior class, and is heading to the east coast to attend a small liberal arts college where she has an academic scholarship and a spot on the soccer team. The book co-authored by Darling Daughter…