I looked on my calendar and there was a reminder that a month from now I will be in Nova Scotia. I try to get in my travel to anywhere north of Santa Barbara between May and October due to a near-fatal allergy to cold weather. I’m looking forward to this trip, for a few…
At SAS Global Forum, someone commented to me that he was stunned at the number of people who were unfamiliar with a c:\ Yes, young people, when us oldsters say “c prompt” we are not talking about a cool shellfish Nope, my dears, in Windows, we expect you to go to that window start menu,…
Since I was a female engineer over thirty years ago, I’ve seen quite a bit of change for women in technology. Still, both then and now, a common complaint is about how women are held back by lack of mentors. Now, being on the other side of the desk, I can see one possible reason…
It occurred to me today that I could not remember ever meeting another Hispanic statistician and I got to wondering how many Hispanic statisticians there actually are. I started with Google, source of all knowledge. I found a blog post from two years ago that said there were 12 Hispanics out of 15,904 members of…
Because I have written a lot of grant proposals and reviewed a lot of proposals, every time that commercial comes on at 3 a.m. saying, “The government wants to give you free money!” I want to do an Elvis impersonation and shoot my TV. The government does not want to give you money. You have…
I’d always found the SPSS help pretty basic, so I don’t even consider it when looking for information. However, courtesy of the UCLA Academic Computing Group, which has a bunch of the SPSS case studies on-line, I found this one on mixed models. It really is one of the most straight-forward explanations of mixed models,…
Generally, when the school principal calls, it’s not a good sign. When the call begins, “I’m sure you weren’t expecting this …” … it’s usually an even worse sign. In this case, however, he had called to say that The Spoiled One was being recommended for a scholarship to a boarding school. We had never…
Want to start a business? Think you’re a good programmer? Have a good design? (By a good design, I don’t mean an idea, I mean pages of scene, character and action description if it’s a game, plus – well, let’s just say one HELL of a lot more than “there should be an app for…
There are some things to like about Statistica. The scatter plot matrix, for one. I’d done a sentiment analysis of a data set on blog posts (not mine). For each post, I had three variables number of negative sentiments expressed in the post, number of positive sentiments expressed in the post total number of comments…
The advantage of learning a new language is it sometimes makes you re-think the old languages you know. For example, here is a problem that happens often: Some people are morons. For example, say I were to ask you the following question: “How old are you?” YOU would probably answer something like, 42 or 21….