Nate Silver: The Statistician’s Hero

While about equal percentages of the general public will be either happy or upset with the outcome of the presidential  and congressional elections, 100% of statisticians will be cheering Nate Silver. The reason I’ve watched Silver’s blog very closely is because I’m a big believer in the Central Limit Theorem, which states that the mean…

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On being a start-up unicorn

Not a day goes by that I don’t read an article saying I don’t exist. Apparently, there are no women actually running start-ups, no Latinos in technology. No one outside of Silicon Valley is doing anything. Maybe I’m a unicorn. Or perhaps I’m invisible. If I were to actually exist, and if it was possible…

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Super-Duper Easy Calculator for Confidence Interval of Difference in Proportions

Today, I wanted to find the confidence interval for the difference between two proportions. I have SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP,  Excel and God knows what else laying around. I did not want to go to the effort of plugging the numbers into a calculator, but it really is a pretty straightforward formula, so you would…

I feel a macro coming on: Part 2 positional, optional & default parameters

Yesterday and the day before, I gave an example of using SAS to sort student responses into the class they were in using the DATEPART function, TIMEPART function and a few DO-loops. After making sure my code runs, I decided it was pretty redundant and thus a classic case for a macro. What I want…

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SAS Enterprise Guide as a Programming Aid – Finding Functions

While I believe SAS Enterprise Guide was developed to make statistical analysis easier for non-programmers, it is also a useful tool for experienced programmers. Often, I find myself thinking, “I KNOW there is  a function that does that ….” but I just can’t remember exactly what it is. Take today as an example. I have…

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Multiple Languages: Why Start-ups are NOT just for young people

I’m never going to understand the idea that start-ups are for young people. It is like the ads you see where people want a 25-year-old with 15 years of experience, you know, “Expert in C++, systems administration, Linux, Windows, SAS, R, Hadoop, Ruby, Python and Java. Must have 5-plus years experience in development for mobile…