Guardienne of the Tomes

I did it again. I forgot. I forgot I was less-than. Texas Republicans reminded me. I don't consider myself disadvantaged. I'm white, which insulates me from all manner of discrimination and prejudice. My parents didn't divorce until I was in my early 20s, giving me and my siblings a stable home, where we were queried on the status of our homework nightly, fed three squares a day, and generally grew up healthy. We weren't rich (though many think that those of us who lived on Long Island must be Hamptons kids - not so) - Dad often had to travel out of state for work, leaving Mom to deal with three relatively well-behaved but still energetic kidlets. Though my parents never went to college, my siblings and I all hold graduate degrees and, considering the state of the economy, are doing well for ourselves. My brother is an accountant, my sister is a sponsored and internationally-competitive triathlete, I'm a faculty librarian. I have been lucky in many, many ways. My...

Frustrated with some data and fed up with my own inability to locate an appropriate statistical technique, I finally posted to Facebook in the hopes that a friend would commiserate with me: "Bending my brain around ILL stats and thinking about exploratory factor analysis with categorical variables, despite the issues with it. Desperately missing [my old group of Emory PoliSci nerdbuddies and profs who were excellent at stats] and brainstorming these sorts of things." Five seconds later, the prof I had tagged in the post replied, "Three words: polychoric correlation matrix." And I had four distinct reactions in rapid succession. They were as follows: First reaction : sarcasm. Well OF COURSE polychoric correlation matrix, duh. Who WOULDN'T know that? Certainly not I. Pshaw. Second reaction : confirmatory exploration. A quick Google search of that conglomeration of words, a quick scan of the Wikipedia description , and yep, this is much closer to what I ne...