I knew it! I am finally getting some time to finish reading The Black Swan and I came across this statement, “Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that ‘statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones’. ” I have thought this for years. Like most of my…
A few days ago I gave an example of multiple imputation but I glossed over a number of things, which is fine when you are just getting into a topic, or when the mad scientist part of your personality has taken over, but seriously now … Our story continues … when last seen, our data…
(Or: Why a computer will not be replacing me any time soon) [Originally, the second half of this was supposed to be an explanation of the real use of multiple imputation which is in estimating parameters but then my daughter came to pick me up early and I got the flu so I am now…
Of course I am most grateful for my family. As daughter number two, a.k. a. , “The Perfect Jennifer”, commented yesterday, “This is the only family I know where everyone in the family actually talks to one another.” It’s true we don’t have any made-for-TV movie problems. No one is in rehab, no divorces, incarcerations,…
Maybe I have been wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, in fact, most of the really great things in my life have come about when I realized I was on the wrong track and took a sharp right turn. (Uncharacteristically skipping the opportunity here to make snarky comment about my first boyfriend, job or…
Everybody is talking now about the acquisition of SPSS by IBM. So far, having just come back from the SPSS DIrections conference, I can’t say that I have seen a lot of differences yet. There seemed like there were a few more SPSS people at the conference, which is a good thing. In my experience,…
So, I am loving my new computer – 12 GB RAM, dual quad-core and a terabyte of space. Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) plus four VMs with Vista 32, Vista 64, Office 32 and Office 64, plus two enormous monitors so I can run Unix programs on our cluster and monitor that while I am…
Someone sent me a video on self-defense a while back showing the various ways people respond when threatened. It noted that we automatically think of ‘weapon-like’ objects for self-defense. We may not actually have a knife or club but we grab a letter-opener, baseball bat or broomstick. The sender noted that other objects can be…
So you want to install SAS for Linux…. Step 1: Read the documentation for some hints on how to download and install the download manager, and the SAS software depot (if you are the SAS administrator). Step 2 : Throw away the documentation. It will just confuse you after this point and it doesn’t help anyway….
Not being able to move much, I have spent a lot more time lately in the company of my 11-year-old daughter, and that is not a bad thing. She started Algebra this year and she commented to me, “You know, when I read this stuff, like Y = 3x +5 and what is Y if…