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,…
Two things, first of all. Those folks in Colorado are unbelievable studs to come out in inches of snow and more falling to a full house at the Denver & northern Colorado / Wyoming SAS users group meeting. I’ll bet the people in North Dakota are…
Next question on categorical data analysis … Correlated proportions. There are a lot of reasons why you might have correlated data in a two-way contingency table. The most common is that you have measured people twice. I have heard people say that including discussion of homosexuality in school makes it more likely that children…
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….
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…
Any time you add another layer of complexity you better have a damn good reason. I’m often skeptical of proponents of both Item Response Theory and multiple imputation procedures, not because either IRT or MI is a bad thing in itself but because its inclusion makes data analysis and reporting more complicated. At the National…
“Can you explain multicollinearity statistics?” she asked. Why, yes, yes I can. First of all, as noted in the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity, “Multicollinearity is not a life-threatening condition except when a depressed graduate student employs multiple, redundant measures.” What is multicollinearity, then, and how do you know if you have it? Multicollinearity is a…
I’ve never understood masochists. Back in the days when I was competing I would regularly get calls from creepy men who were willing to pay me big bucks to beat them up. As one of my lovely daughters said of the sumo wrestler who sent her a picture of himself posing in his diaper-thingie and…
I received two doctoral fellowships, and, years later, a post-doctoral fellowship. My grandmother, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and had never been to college, was quite worried. On more than one occasion, she grilled me about what I actually did, and when I told her that I went to the library, read, and then…