I wouldn’t normally consider Excel for analysis, but there are four reasons I’ll be using it sometimes for the next class I’m teaching. First of all, we start out with some pretty basic statistics, I’m not even sure I’d call them statistics, and Excel is good for that kind of stuff. Second, Excel now has…
It’s been about a year since I last looked at SAS Studio much – OKAY, LISTEN UP PEOPLE In my previous life, I taught for years at a small liberal arts college, with under 2,000 students. I also taught at a tribal community college with less than 500 students. In neither of those situations did…
I’ve hardly blogged, answered emails or talked to anyone these past few months. We just received funding for two games and I have been working night and day, crisscrossing the country recording voices, demonstrating prototypes, contracting for art and animation, reviewing designs and fixing bugs. Ah, the bugs. We have arrived at the level of…
Occasionally, when I am teaching about a topic like repeated measures Analysis of Variance, a brave student will raise a hand and ask, Seriously, professor, WHEN will I ever use this? The aspiring director of a library, clinic, afterschool program, etc. does not see how statistics apply to conducting an outreach campaign or HIV screening…
At the Western Users of SAS Software conference (yes, they DO know that is WUSS), I’ll be speaking about using SAS for evaluation. “If the results bear any relationship at all to reality, it is indeed a fortunate coincidence.” I first read that in a review of research on expectancy effects, but I think it…
Occasionally, a brave student will ask me, When will I ever use this? The “this” can be anything from a mixed model analysis to nested arrays. (I have answers for both of those, by the way.) I NEVER get that question when discussing topics like filtering data, whether for records or variables, because it is…
Where we left off, I had created some parcels and was going to do a factor analysis later. Now, it’s later. If you’ll recall, I had not find any items that correlated significantly with the food item that also made sense conceptually. For example, it correlated highly with attending church services but that didn’t really…
First of all, what are parcels? Not the little packages your grandma left on the table in the hall when she came back from shopping. Well, not only that. In factor analysis, parcels are simply the sum of a small number of items. I prefer using parcels when possible because both basic psychometric theory and…
In a very random life event, I was asked a lot of questions recently by people exploring making a movie about my life. This is not the interesting part, because in Hollywood people are always talking about making movies that come to nothing … The interesting thing was how many times the answer to a…
At first, I was thinking it wasn’t right to have a favorite paper, but then I realized that was idiotic. It’s not like these papers (or their presenters) are my children. My favorite paper was, Statistical modeling for large complex data: Five new directions from SAS/STAT software If you’re not a statistician, props to you…