I was going to come back to the hotel after work and finish up my paper for the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference. This one is called Better-looking SAS for a Better Community. It was going to use the analyses I did of inequality in America and presented to urban Los Angeles middle…
Getting my papers written for the 2011 Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) meeting . All three papers are in the SAS Essentials strand, which is designed to provide a jump start in their career for relatively new programmers. I’ve given some version of this talk a few times before, and I sometimes think it…
We’re one of those small businesses that congress claims to care so much about. We’re also, many years, a couple that makes over whatever the limit is for raising taxes. Whenever we see a tax credit, whether it’s for child care, or alternative minimum tax or whatever, we just ignore it because we know we…
I have learned not to be too smart for my own good. Yesterday was an example. My client provides many different types of services to the consumers who use their program. There are about 15 different options, from counseling to on-the-job training to assistive technology. We want to get the total number of services each…
Been working with SAS a lot lately to get the data in shape for a new client. Here’s one of the problems I ran across. We want to get the average pay rate for people who got jobs as a result of our client’s services. However, when one of the people they served did not…
When people ask me what type of statistical software to use, I run through the advantages and disadvantages, but always conclude, “Of course, whatever you choose is going to give you the same results. It’s not as if you’re going to get a F-value of 67.24 with SAS and one of 2.08 with Stata. Your…
What must everyone know and why must everyone know that? This was one of the two central questions in Dr. J.T. Dillon’s course on Curriculum and Instruction, which I thought was going to be a colossal waste of time. After all, I was going to be a statistician, why would I need a course on…
Two incidents happened lately where results I expected to be the same turned out to be different. The first one involved two Excel files sent to me from one of my favorite clients. (You’re all my favorite clients!) One of the files was an Excel file on a Mac. The other was created on a…
I’m working on the SAS Naked Mole Rat book and was writing about residual variance. It occurred to me that I just threw in a chart and assumed that people would know what residual variance was and moved right along. This reminds me of the time the rocket scientist had a sign outside of his…
Yesterday, I was at Griffith Observatory with the world’s most spoiled 13-year-old. We were there because she is in a Summer Scholars program that is designed to provide academic enrichment for high-achieving girls. Unfortunately, not being as high-achieving as we might like, she got a B- on her latest test, and given that the teacher…