In my analysis of data on the oldest old from the Kaiser Permanente study, I started with cigar smoking because I have a friend who turned 65 last month. His annual physical went like this: Doctor: Do you still smoke cigars? Jim: Yep. Doctor: Do you still drink 8 or 9 beers every night? Jim: Yep….
(Yes, that title does sound like a lot of the spam comments I get. ) Last year, at the Gov. 2.0 conference in Santa Monica, Jean Holm, from NASA spoke about some of the opportunities for open data. I left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the best examples she gave were, I thought,…
After watching Black in America: The New Promised Land, about eight black entrepreneurs trying to get traction in Silicon Valley, I read some of the articles on line about it and some of the comments (always a mistake), comments which served up further proof that there should be some sort of IQ requirement to use…
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…
It is not every day that my refrigerator provides insight into a statistical problem. My daughter gave me this magnet. BIRTHDAYS ARE GOOD FOR YOU. STATISTICS SHOW THAT PEOPLE WHO HAVE THE MOST BIRTHDAYS LIVE THE LONGEST. which led to my thoughts on life expectancy using open data. Kaiser Permanente collected data on two cohorts…
I watched Black in America: Silicon Valley, The New Promised Land with Soledad O’Brien on the accelerator for black entrepreneurs. It was a terrific show and I highly recommend it. An interesting comment was made by one of the venture capitalists when O’Brien asked him why a white, wealthy male like him cares about diversity…
Continuing on with questions students asked at the end of the semester … Note that the following questions were asking what I personally do, and I answered the same way. These are not rules that anyone has to follow, like taking the square root of the variance to find the standard deviation, but they are,…
It’s that time of year, near the end of the semester, when I ask students to write down any questions they may have about material covered in the course. This semester I am teaching Advanced Quantitative Data Analysis. I thought other people might be interested in the answers to the questions students asked as well….
Anyone who has ever taught has probably had this experience … you are reading a student paper and think, “I really don’t understand what he/ she is trying to say here.” Like most professors, you probably assume that in these situations, the students aren’t very clear on the concepts themselves. You’re probably…
Today was a lesson in why one should always be a little leery of mean substitution. I had downloaded a data set to use as a logistic regression example for my class tomorrow. It happened to be the 2010 Monitoring the Future study and I was particularly interested in school drop out. This is a…