It’s been almost two weeks of reviewing textbooks, revising my syllabus and I have to go back to it in a couple of hours to edit my last few powerpoints before class starts. Yes, when I was a brand-new baby professor I was sometimes rushing to write a lecture before class, but now that I…
Hopefully, you have read my Beginner’s Guide to Propensity Score matching or through some other means become aware of what the hell propensity score matching is. Okay, fine, how do you get those propensity scores? Think about this carefully for a moment, if you are using quintiles, you are matching people by which group they…
One advantage of writing this blog for almost a decade is that there are a lots of topics I have already covered. However, software moving at the speed that it does, there are always updates. So, today I’m going to recycle a couple of older posts that introduce you to propensity score matching. Then, tomorrow,…
I have to choose between either SAS or SPSS for a new course in multivariate statistics. You can take it up with the university if you like, but these are my only two options, in part because the course is starting soon. I need to decide in a few days which way to go. Here…
The most useful function Facebook has served for me is as a time machine. That is, students, friends and acquaintances I had not seen in 20, 30 or 40 years, who are in my memory as small children or teenagers all of a sudden reappear in my life as young adults with spouses and children,…
The year I turned 55, I wrote a series of blog posts on 55 things I’ve learned in 55 years. I’ve probably learned more than three things since, but one particular lesson has come back to me over and over the past few years. People are more than their accomplishments – sometimes for better and…
It ought to be easier than this and perhaps I could have found an easier way if I had more patience than the average ant or very young infant. However, I don’t. Here was the problem. I wanted control charts for two different variables, satisfaction with care, surveyed at discharge, and satisfaction with care 3…
Let me begin by acknowledging that anyone who can afford to fly to Trinidad and Tobago to learn more about the culture and ends up pitching a reality show is in the extreme of privileged and fortunate people on this planet. I also realize that anyone who travels as much as I do is bound…
Perhaps you have watched the Socrata videos on how to do data visualization with government data sets and it is still not working for you. Here is a step by step example of answering a simple question. Is the prevalence of alcohol use among youth higher in rural states than urban ones? You can…
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…