Question authority. Whenever I hear authoritative statements made that don’t fit with the world I see around me, I try to follow up. How many times have we been told that the U.S. is just terrible in math, we are falling behind educationally, China and India are eating our lunch – deservedly so, because our…
Now, I’m not as extreme as the person who created a SAS Tetris game, (Richard DeVenezia, in case you were wondering) but I still try to do just about everything in SAS, if only to prove that I can do it. Why would someone who has been using SAS for 28 years decide to pick…
“How do you get business?” I get asked this a lot, and since I doubt random people I meet at conferences are truly interested in my life, I think what they really want to know is: “How can I get business as a consultant?” I’ve been working as a consultant for over thirty years. Here…
“How do you get business?” I get asked this a lot, and since I doubt random people I meet at conferences are truly interested in my life, I think what they really want to know is: “How can I get business as a consultant?” I’ve been working as a consultant for over thirty years. Here…
Lately, I’ve been missing some of my former colleagues at the USC Medical School. This is not just because they are super-nice people, which they are, but also because they used to ask for different types of statistics, and I do think variety is the spice of life – except for in marital relationships where…
I’m doing a workshop at the San Diego SAS users group meeting on Wednesday and had suggested opening the session with a clip of my daughter’s last amateur fight. Someone politely commented, “Uh, I guess that would be okay, if it was, uh, relevant.” Fair question, how can martial arts be related to statistics or…
Yesterday, I talked about using a macro for beginning checks on data quality and I promised to explain it today. So, here we go… options mstored sasmstore = maclib ; If you want to store your macro, you need to use two options in the OPTIONS statement. MSTORED that you want the stored compiled macros…
I will be missing my lovely daughter Ronda’s fight in Calgary next month because I will be attending the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in Orlando, Florida, where sports journalist and equally lovely daughter Maria Burns Ortiz will be. It is completely false that this proves Maria is the favorite child. In addition to…
I used to think that a clean house was a sign of a wasted life. After all, why would anyone spend time cleaning when they could be reading, writing, teaching, running, programming, doing judo or drinking margaritas at the pier watching the sun go down? Well, I still don’t alphabetize my spices or clean the…
Yesterday, I wrote a post asking if we really suck at math and questioning the value of spending 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from kindergarten to tenth-grade on the path to achieve a perfect math SAT score. Today, I read the last post by Derek Miller. It begins, “Here it is. I’m…