Admit it, more than once you have thought to yourself, Wouldn’t it be convenient about now to have some mindless minions to do my bidding? I’d always thought if this whole statistical consulting thing didn’t work out, I could be an evil scientist. I mean, I already went to the trouble to get a Ph.D….
I met Corinna when she was a member of the 1996 Olympic team. In the intervening 15 years she has had a battle with mental illness – or maybe I should say, the mental health system. This article is re-posted, with permission, from her blog, where she writes about mental illness, mental health, motivational speaking,…
Getting an MRS degree is an effective strategy. You care about conditional distributions even if you don’t know what they are. When I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1970s, nearly all of my friends (and the vast majority…
The Agresti and Finlay book, Statistical methods in the social sciences , has a nice section on bivariate descriptive statistics. (And thank you to the person on twitter who recommended that book. I apologize that I can’t remember who it was.) I got to thinking about that today, especially with regard to categorical data. Often…
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…
1. It’s free. Some people say this is just the evil corporate answer to R. Maybe. Probably. I don’t care. I don’t see Microsoft giving me anything for free. 2. It’s pretty easy for an instructor to get an account. I presume SAS verifies your instructor account. First you need a SAS Profile https://www.sas.com/profile/user/create.htm Then…
PROC UNIVARIATE is for numeric data. I use it a lot of times as the first step in my categorical data analyses. How weird is that? Okay, well, maybe it’s not leafy sea dragon level of strange but it does seem an odd thing to do. After all, much of the output that PROC UNIVARIATE…
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…
Today, taking a break from writing the grant proposal that has no end, I found myself thinking about easy ways to explain and understand standard error. To understand standard error, you have to have some statistic that you’re discussing the standard error of. As a random example, let’s just take the mean. T-TEST PROCEDURE FOR…
The census now allows more than one race to be checked. For many years, friends of mine in inter-racial couples when they registered their children for school would check the “Other” box for race, rather than pick black or white. Although an individual’s census form responses are confidential, you certainly are free to tell anyone…