It all comes down to one word: Perseverance. Yesterday was the first time I got to read my dossier for the 40 women to watch over 40. In it was a quote from someone who had nominated me: “I think that perseverance is key to her success.” The tagline from my interview that just aired…
“The problem with women isn’t that they leave you, but that they have to tell you WHY.” Whether in teaching judo, statistics, programming or management, I’m a big fan of telling people why. As I said before, the first step in programming is to THINK. This applies to statistical programming as well, which is what…
The Mplus website has free videos on using Mplus. The introductory course (not very introductory, really, because the the main topics are advanced factor analysis and structural equation modeling) has some pretty good resources. While it is not professional quality – just a video of a class – and much of it is beyond the…
Many people have commented how ironic it is that I’m writing computer games these days because I’m one of the least playful people you’ll meet. I have a confession to make, although confession is perhaps the wrong word because I don’t feel the least bit bad about it. Playing with small children bores me. Don’t…
Once upon a time there were statisticians who thought the answer to everything was to be as precise, correct and “bleeding edge” as possible. If their analyses were precise to 12 decimal places instead of 5, of course they were better because as everyone knows , 12 is more than 5 (and statisticians knew it…
Before the semester began, I debated about requiring SAS on-demand for my statistics course. In fact, after giving it some thought, I decided to make use optional rather than mandatory. One reason for my hesitation was uncertainty about basing a major part of students’ grades on a project requiring an untested software package. I could…
In case you don’t know – SAS On-Demand is the “cloud-based” version of SAS for teaching and research at universities. That’s a fancy way of saying it runs on the SAS servers and it’s free. Lately I have been happily working with SAS On-Demand for academics so I was a bit surprised speaking with someone…
Given that I taught my first statistics course in something like 1987 , it’s surprising how much I am looking forward to teaching this fall. I gave up being a full-time professor in 1997. Both my academic career and my consulting business were requiring my undivided attention and I had to choose one. I’ve never…
I’m currently at a seminar in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics. I’ve seen the notices for these a lot of times over the years, and always thought, “Well, that looks interesting” but never applied to go, primarily because although your expenses are paid, there is no stipend, so that is…
I admit that I am hardly a typical user for statistical software, given that I had to go online to download a file with less than 7,000 records and less than 500 variables. STILL, I have to say that PSPP was a disappointment in a great many ways. This is NOT to say that it…