I’ve spent a good bit of my life living and working in places that many of my colleagues would not drive through in the middle of the day with the windows rolled up and the car doors locked, so you’ll have to excuse me if I am a bit cynical about the latest push to…
Visual literacy, being the word chooser of this blog, I have decided means the ability to “read” graphic information. A post I saw today on Facebook earnings over time gave a prime example of this. If you are a fluent “visualizer”, then just like a fluent reader can read a paragraph and comprehend it,…
If I had a clone, all of my code would be beautiful. Last week, I was a speaker at the Tribal Disability Conference in Turtle Mountain, where I spoke on starting a business. Then, I went for a site visit at Spirit Lake Vocational Rehabilitation followed by another talk on self-employment at the Tribal Disability…
When we started the Dakota Learning Project to evaluate our educational games, I wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew. We proposed to develop the games, pilot them in schools, collect data and analyze the data to see if the games had any impact. We were also going to go back…
Here is a little note for people on customer service: Every company I have ever worked with that has terrible customer service apologizes a lot and makes soothing noises in lieu of actually doing anything. When your company fucks up it does NO good to say how sorry you are and you empathize. I really…
Our story so far … I suggested that people with disabilities who are successful in education, jobs or self-employment don’t define themselves as disabled, and neither do the people around them. It can’t be that simple, right? Have a positive attitude, look on the sunny side of life and next thing you know, people are…
I’m looking forward to speaking at the Turtle Mountain Disabilities Conference and not just because they have one of the best conference logos I have ever seen. This topic reminds me of a joke my friend told me. His specialty is geriatrics and one day one of his patients came to him and…
More notes from the text mining class. … This is the article I mentioned in the last post, on Singular Value Decomposition ftp://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/EMiner/TamingTextwiththeSVD.pdf Contrary to expectations, I did find time to read it, on the ride back from Las Vegas and it is surprisingly accessible even to people who don’t have a graduate degree in statistics,…
Hot tip: If you are a professor, you have access to some major benefits from SAS. The main ones that jump to mind are: Free classes that are worth FAR more than you paid for them. Free software via SAS On-Demand. Free books – up to two per semester. Free teaching materials You can get…
Maybe this is obvious, but I have often found that what is obvious to some people is not so obvious to others, so here are a few random tips. 1. Enterprise Miner can take a REALLY long time to load during which you wonder if anything is happening at all. Open up the task manager…