This post is a public service to these people who tell me that they are going to write a blog and make money “from the advertising revenue”. In short, it’s a bad idea. Perhaps you have amazing things to say and you will be one of the tiny, tiny fraction of bloggers who make a…
Perhaps people wouldn’t be so hesitant to change careers during mid-life if they paid a little bit more attention to start-ups. Having been in start-up mode for the past few years, I’ve read numerous articles with titles like, “Five things you should know about start-ups” “Eleven reasons start-ups fail” “Six keys to start-up success” “Nine…
Since it’s the weekend – and if you read this blog very often you know I don’t really do weekends but I’m stuck on a plane with no wifi and the wordpress app, so it’s time for Mama AnnMaria’s Advice on Life. Try to control your excitement. Learn how! I mean it. I don’t know…
One of the problems many students have when first learning statistics is deciding when to reject the null hypothesis. Z is small and low probability means it is not likely to occur so you reject, right? (Wrong!). P > .86 and when you have a large z-score you reject the null hypothesis, so with p…
It had been a difficult morning in Minot, North Dakota. My husband was in intensive care in Bismarck, 130 miles away. After visiting him for hours the night before, we had gotten home late. The children were late getting up. On the gravel road from our house to the highway, the muffler had come loose…
Today was my most recent experience in the clash of commercial and academic cultures. For seven years, I was an assistant and then associate professor, teaching statistics and research methods, writing articles for academic journals. For five years before that, I was a graduate student at the University of California. I even did a post-doc…
I was reading the powerpoints that came with a textbook, you know, in the instructor’s packet, and I was already thinking this book was a little more focused on computation over comprehension for my liking when I came to the following learning objective: “Compute an Analysis of Variance by hand.” Are you fucking kidding me?…
It’s that time of year again when we hear complaints about how terrible the U.S. is doing in math. This article by The Atlantic with the title American Schools vs. the World: Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math is just one of many, many reports that showed up in my twitter stream. The first question anyone…
One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How do you get so much done?” I sometimes think that growing up without advantages can be an advantage. For example, when I was a kid, I never had my own room. I always shared it with my sister, or sometimes my sister and my…
This month, I’m teaching biostatistics for National University, and so far I am really enjoying it. There is just a really minor problem, though. While I received a copy of the textbook, I did not receive a copy of the instructor’s manual with answers to the homework problems. Since I am going to grade 20…