My initial exposure to Occam’s razor came in my first undergraduate economics class. Perhaps due to my tender years, it made a great impression, and I have tried to apply it ever since. In short, Occam’s razor advises us when presented with competing, plausible choices, the…
1. Use the data sets in the sashelp directory for dummy data. 2. The RANUNI function is worth remembering Today I needed to check something. Specifically, I was using the ranuni function to generate random numbers for sampling with replacement. I wanted the data set to be sorted randomly, select the first match, then re-sort…
COMPLETELY RANDOM THOUGHTS on business sparked by twitter…. I live just south of Malibu, a city filled with the type of houses God would have built if he only he’d had enough money. Often, I’ll take the afternoon off and go hiking in the Santa Monica mountains, peeking into the backyards, tennis courts and golfing…
Photo from Nic Cubrilovic. Creative Commons license. Thanks, dude! It’s been 15-20 years since I was last a member of the American Statistical Association. I read an article in their journals occasionally but not much of it is relevant to me. I work with clients who are designing surveys, analyzing messy data and evaluating programs….
In a few (okay, a lot) of my previous posts I talked about how you could get set up with SAS On-Demand, problems you might have, programs to run. Now we get to the crux of the matter. Why? Let’s assume that you are like most professors in America and your students are like most…
Last week, I was relaxing in bed reading a book when my daughter, Julia, came storming into the room. She demanded, “Mom! Have you heard of SOPA?” I informed her that yes, in fact, I had. She said she had read about it on Google and written a letter to her Congressman. Students in her…
The other night, I was annoyed. This is a common state for me, so not too surprising. I was annoyed because I could not log on to SAS On-demand. I would click the icon on my desktop and the log in screen would come up with my username filled in. About a minute after I…
Three times within a very short period I have seen technology offerings that I thought were an epic fail. In one case I was a beta tester, in one, a regular user and in the third a personal friend of the founder. All of them, I thought, had brilliant ideas that fit a real need…
(If you are too young to remember the song, “Money for nothing and your chicks for free”, I guess the title of this post is not nearly as amusing to you as it was to me, as my lovely daughter so unhelpfully pointed out.) Since I whined yesterday about Codecademy not providing much explanation of…
Seriously, someone has to say something about Codecademy ‘s courses. I feel like the little kid in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. You know, the one where supposedly the clothes are made from cloth only really intelligent people can see, so no one wants to point out the emperor is actually naked. With a…