According to the New York Times, 45% of people make New Year’s resolutions and although 54% of them fail, the percentage who succeed (46% , proof that I can subtract and understand the concept of percentages) is more than ten times higher than for those people who say they would like to change but don’t…
I read a lot. This year, I finished 308 books on my Kindle app, another dozen on iBooks, a half-dozen on ebrary and 15 or 20 around the house. I don’t read books on paper very often any more. It’s not too practical for me. I go through them at the rate of about a book…
One of the studies cited in Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, that really resonated with me was the one that said we judge women in the work place based on their accomplishments but men on their potential. Women are judged on accomplishments, Men on potential. This phenomena is one of the (many) reasons the whole…
(There may even be a part two, if I get around to it.) Let me ask you a couple of questions: 1. Do you have more than just one dependent variable and one independent variable? 2. If you said, yes, do you have a CATEGORICAL or ORDINAL dependent variable? If so, use logistic regression. I…
There may come a day (shudder) when I am called upon to find what my mother refers to as “a real job”. I’m not sure how I would go about it. For the past 30 years, here is how my career has gone. I was walking in the door at the university where I had…
This is the most depressing chart I have seen in a long time. Below are the results of our pretest on knowledge of fraction operations of 322 students in grades 3 through 7, attending schools on and adjacent to American Indian reservations. These are questions like, “Drag 6/1 to the correct spot on the number…
I was going to call this new category for my blog “Mama AnnMaria’s advice on not getting your ass fired” but it turned out to be too long to fit in the box. It may surprise young people in the work place to find out that people who admit to having screwed up are often…
What if you wanted to turn your PROC MIXED into a repeated measures ANOVA using PROC GLM. Why would you want to do this? Well, I don’t know why you would want to do it but I wanted to do it because I wanted to demonstrate for my class that both give you the same…
I have been teaching at the post-secondary level since 1987, at schools ranging from a small liberal arts college in North Dakota to the second-largest non-profit university in the country. I’ve taught at private schools and public ones, and courses ranging from first year undergraduate to doctoral students. In all of those situations, some students…
Any time you learn anything new it can be intimidating. That is true of programming as well as anything else. It may be even more true of using statistical software because you combine the uneasiness many people have about learning statistics with learning a new language. To a statistician, this error message makes perfect sense:…