Sometimes, you can just eyeball it. Really, if something truly is an outlier, you ought to be able to spot it. Take this plot, for example. It should be pretty obvious that the vast majority of our sample for the Fish Lake game were students in grades, 4, 5 and 6. Those in the lower…
I’m really busy here in Brazil. Honest. You think I am sitting here like this: But really, it’s like this: Still, I have taken time away to explain to you how not to get your sorry ass fired, so listen up niños . I had the benefit of starting writing software at a large organization,…
Well, I don’t know about you, but I am anyway, and I’m guessing if you are reading this that you probably are, too. If you read the bottom half of the internet (a.k.a. the comments section), you’ll find that any mention of privilege sets some people off … I’m not privileged! My parents didn’t have…
It was recently noted on our company twitter account that I’m out of town so often that I’ve come to resemble the Travelocity gnome in more than stature. I’ve been traveling on business for nearly my entire career. Despite the proliferation of Google hangouts, Skype, Webex, Go-to-Meeting, FaceTime and God knows how many other technological…
Previously, I discussed PROC FREQ for checking the validity of your data. Now we are on to data analysis, but, as anyone who does analysis for more than about 23 minutes can tell you, cleaning your data and doing analysis is seldom a two-step process. In fact, it’s more like a loop of two steps,…
People often ask me how I get so much done. Over and over, I have found one of the simplest ways to increase productivity is by not reading my email in the morning. Some days, I don’t get around to reading it at all. This evening, when I finally opened my email, I had over…
It seems as if parents can do no right. Parents who are very involved, who coach their children’s sports teams, who insist that their child not skip practice are criticized for living through their children. However, as every Disney after-school special ever will tell you, God save the child whose parent has an actual job…
I’m in the middle of data preparation on a research project on games to teach fractions. This is the part of a data analysis project that takes up 80% of the time. Fortunately, PROC FREQ from SAS can simplify things. 1. How many unique records ? There are multiple quizzes in the game, and you…
I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite when it comes to documentation. In every staff meeting, I emphasize documenting whatever code you have written that week, but I always put off doing it myself. My excuse is always that it isn’t final and when I get the complete project done I will put it in the wiki….
Everyone should pause every now and then and ask themselves this question: What would you want to be doing if you weren’t doing this? Whatever “this” is, your answer will be revealing. If you excitedly exclaim, “I would start a restaurant, using my grandma’s recipes, but it would be more of a modern look –…