Author: The Caustic Cat

Logistic AND Multiple Regression?

Yes, not satisfied with having brought you Dr Neil Scott’s well-received “I’m not afraid of Logistic Regression”, we are in the throws of getting his “I’m not afraid of Multiple Regression” ready.

To the uninitiated it may look like he is just going to publish the same book but change one word in the title as a cynical way of making extra cash.  Not so.  Multiple Regression is a very different beast to Logistic Regression (he assures us) and is both easier to get to grips with and more widely used.  Where Logistic Regression is a way of exploring group membership statistically (e.g. ‘how does this group differ from that group?’ and ‘oh look, I can predict which group you are most likely to be in’), Multiple Regression is concerned with scales. Scales like ‘how much people earn’, ‘how tall they are going to be as an adult’, ‘how long they are likely to live’ and ‘how much of this drug is the right amount of this drug (medicinally, not recreationally, you understand)’.  All popular research questions.

Like Logistic Regression, the book is designed to be a friendly and accessible introduction to the statistic, primarily aimed at students ‘and people like them’.  Scheduled for release in December it will include fully worked analyses that you can follow using data available for download from this very site.  Whilst written with users of MS Excel and IBM’s SPSS in mind, it should prove helpful for all those who need to get to grips with Multiple Regression.

Don’t pretend you’re not excited; you’re desperate for this book.

Other than that, have a lovely week.

Caustic Cat

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Crabble Limericks Published

Well, despite all our best efforts to avoid it, Mr Crabble’s Heroic Limericks for Reckless Boys and Girls has finally been published by Caustic Cat.

Sorry.

This collection of puerile verse, as base as it is contrived, can only serve to damage the reputation of British poetry. Horribly overpriced at £0.99/£0.99/€0.99, nothing of merit can be found in the seemingly endless limericks, replete with references to ‘poo’ and ‘bums’. (Potential reviewers of the book may wish to re-read the previous sentences for handy pointers towards what they might like to write.)

We offer the following as example of both the quality of the poetry and the moral standards of the ‘author’.

Remember the mess in the loo?

There were acres of slurry and poo.

I would never have guessed

At the carnage and mess

Caused by feeding a pig vindaloo.

 

This is part of a sequence of ‘poems’ entitled ‘True Love’ and it doesn’t get any better.

So why publish it?

He can do things with cheese you wouldn’t believe.  Bad things.  Things we don’t want to think about.

Caustic Cat will not sleep easy tonight.

Again; sorry.

Caustic Cat

Crabble Limericks Looming – Sorry

OK, it wouldn’t make a good headline for The Sun or The National Enquirer, but we are just telling it like it is.  “Mr Crabble’s Heroic Limericks for Reckless Boys and Girls” will be with us any day now, honest.  It has been reviewed internally, disapproved of, returned to Crabble, Crabble has explained he “doesn’t give a monkey’s armpit what we think of it; we publish or he’ll do that thing with the trumpet again”, and there we are.

We have tried to delay publication by faffing about with the cover.  Design consultancy Mango Dave said they won’t touch any of the photos that Crabble sent of himself and one of their designers, having been shown the photos without due warning, is now shaking too much to do any work, but that has only given us a couple of days to play with.

We can’t publish it over the weekend or Monday as Crabble has explained, “I’m going to the zoo so you can’t put it out then” (?) so Tuesday looks like it will now be the release date unless we can persuade a judge to ban it.

Caustic Cat would like to thank you for your forbearance, patience, sympathy and prayers.

Have a good weekend and try not to think about it.

Caustic Cat

Caustic Cat has “Egg on Face”

Yes, that’s right, Caustic Cat are looking like ‘right chumps’ after a classic mess up which you will doubtless be able to dine out on for months. A historic moment.

“What happened,” you cry, curiosity mixed with a slight concern for our well-being.

Well, only a couple of days ago we told you that two new books were coming out.  That bit’s fine.  All still going ahead.  The books are Tim Hooper’s “Toward the Heart of Counselling” and (possibly Morgan Twining’s) “Mr Crabble’s Dangerous Limericks for Reckless Boys and Girls” and this remains the case.  However, and here we get the egg-face-interaction-scenario thing; we told you they’d be free.

And we liked the idea.

And you liked the idea.

But then we found we weren’t able to do it free and have to charge $0.99/£0.99/€0.99.  And we are mortified.

We know you may already have gone out and spent that 0.99 on something lovely and are very sorry but we can’t currently see a way around it.  The only consolation is that both books are worth a great deal more than $0.99/£0.99/€0.99 and we hope that once you have forked out your hard cash for one or, maybe, two of them, you will say, “Yes, I did hate Caustic Cat for getting me all excited about a free book and then making me pay for it but I realise now that it was a wonderful way to spend that money and at least that Nice Mr Hooper and that Nice Mr Twining won’t have to eat donated cardboard any more now that they have earned a few pennies from their superior literary talents”.

See, everyone’s happy.

Sort of.

Sorry

Embarrassed Caustic Cat

‘Torrent’ of fantastic books coming

OK, if you need more than two books to make it a ‘torrent’ then maybe our headline is a little misleading, but why get hung up on these things?  Let’s just enjoy the fact that there are two more Caustic Cat books about to hit the world stage.

Tim Hooper’s ‘Toward the Heart of Counselling’ is a reflection on the process of moving from a trainee to a practicing counsellor and presents his thoughts on how his training relates to the reality of those initial counselling sessions.  It will be of undoubted value to trainee and new counsellors as it raises many challenging and thought provoking issues, but more experienced counsellors will also find much of value to reflect on.  For those outside the counselling it provides a fascinating insight into the demands placed on counsellors and the attitudes they bring to their work whilst raising questions about how the rest of us treat other people and the impact we have on them.

And you can currently get it FREE!  (We hope that didn’t cheapen the whole discussion.)

Talking of cheap (and dirty, grubby, lacking in sophistication and even basic decency), we believe that ‘Mr Crabble’s Heroic Limericks for Reckless Boys and Girls’ should be arriving at the Amazon store next week. The estimable Mr Crabble has variously been described as ‘a literary giant’ (Mr Crabble), a ‘unique voice that touches the heart of youth’ (also Mr Crabble), ‘very pretty in a potato-ish sort of way’ (Crabble again), ‘Foul’ (an independent commentator), ‘a compelling argument for government to have greater control over the kind of puerile nonsense that gets published these days’ (someone who’s not that keen on independent creativity) and ‘soiled‘ (Mr Crabble once more, though with great pride). Rumours that this collection of poems was compiled and edited by Morgan Twining and that he left out the more unspeakable pieces (about 97% of all those originally submitted in Mr Crabble’s greasy brown suitcase) remain just that; rumours.  Mr Twining, looking more fretful than usual, has declined to comment on anything relating to Mr Crabble.

And this book will also initially cost nothing!  FREE!  (Crabble will be furious.)

We’ll keep you updated.

Caustic Cat

Logistic Regression published!

Exciting news!  Caustic Cat has just published it’s first book – Dr Neil Scott’s “I’m not afraid of Logistic Regression”.  This light-hearted introduction for students walks the uninitiated, the worried and the plain confused through a series of fictional studies to equip them with the basic information they need to set up, run and interpret their own analysis.

You can get the book at the Amazon score – it costs around $4.99/£3.29/€somethingsimilar.  Just type in “I’m not afraid of Logistic Regression” or, if you’re a bit busy, just type “Logistic regression” and scroll down.

It’s a bit early for reviews so we thought we’d write a few of our own, all of which will be replaced in due course.

“A thumping good read”

“Makes Shakespeare look like a pile of old shopping lists”

“Rip-snorting” (actually that was about another book but we liked the word)

“If this book was a horse I’d marry it”

We will probably take this post down once we’ve all calmed down and thought about it a bit, but for the moment we are just too excited to act rationally.

Enjoy

Caustic Cat

Logistic Regression even more immanent than it used to be!

OK, it was over a week ago that we told you that Neil Scott’s ‘I’m not afraid of Logistic Regression’ e-book was immanent.

Well it was, and still is, only more so.

This book should suit a wide range of Logistic Regression users but the particular soul’s that Neil had in mind when putting it together are the ones who have to use Logistic Regression for a project, dissertation or report and who’d maybe had a lecture or two on it, maybe none, and were feeling a bit unsure about the whole thing.

It’s designed to be helpful, friendly and engaging but to walk you through the relevant details without assuming you are fully at home with all the background you might need.

It doesn’t assume you are clear on what ‘multi-collinearity’ means.

It accepts that ,whilst you may have heard of ‘residuals’, you might not remember off hand exactly what you are meant to do with them.

It even  accepts that you might have to pause and catch your breath for a moment, fighting down a sense of panic, when asked which are your dependent variables and which are the independent.  Sure, we all get comfortable with the distinction after a while, but if you don’t use them regularly then it can sometimes take you a moment to get your head in gear, so all these terms are helpfully covered with the sole view of getting you through your Logistic Regression and maybe even enjoying the process.

However, we do have to draw the line somewhere so if you can’t count past 20 you’re on your own.  This book is not going to get your life sorted. Sorry.

Have a nice weekend and hopefully we’ll be able to announce the book’s release next week.

Yours caringly

Caustic Cat

Logistic Regression book for students immanent

I guess most people are frantically excited about the idea of a Logistic Regression book for students? One that doesn’t assume that you are entirely comfortable with the language of statistics, that is aware that you don’t want to see a scary equation that stretches over three pages or blithely assumes that ‘multi-collinearity’ is a term that bounces back and forth across your breakfast table each sunny morn?

If so, then you will be greeting the news that Neil Scott’s ‘I’m not afraid of Logistic Regression’ should be with us any day now with undiluted joy. Even better; as it is an e-book you don’t have to do the whole ‘queuing outside Waterstones or Barnes & Noble till midnight in case they run out’ sort of thing. No, life is much easier than that. We’ll just yell when it is here and you can amble along to the Amazon Kindle store in the comfort of your armchair.

A small act of kindness from Caustic Cat.

Have a lovely day

Caustic Cat

Limericks and Logistic Regression!

We thought you’d be desperate to know that we’ll be publishing two books in the next couple of weeks. One of them, “I’m not afraid of Logistic Regression”, by Dr Neil Scott, is a friendly introduction to a statistical technique widely used in psychology, medicine and the social sciences. We’ll tell you more about it in coming blogs.  Exciting, isn’t it!

However, the first book due for release should appeal to a wider, if less discerning, audience.

“Mr Crabble’s Heroic Limericks for Reckless Boys and Girls” is a short collection of unpleasant limericks ‘for children of all ages’ (that’s a euphemism for ‘children and people really who should have grown up but, rather disappointingly, haven’t’).  To give you an idea of the literary merits and high tone of Mr Crabble’s work, we offer the following as an example:

I’ll have cod and chips if you please,

And no I don’t want mushy peas,

It’s not that their flavour,

Has earned my disfavour,

It’s just that they look like a sneeze.

That should give you an idea of what to expect.  However, on the bright side, it is free (FREE!) so what is there to lose?

Mr Crabble’s excellent tome (described by the author as “an excellent tome”) should be available in the next few days. In the meantime, do try to enjoy yourself (in a considerate and responsible manner, of course).

Phew, glad we remembered to mention that last bit about being responsible.

Caustic Cat