Since I already called my mom on Mother’s Day, I thought that I’d talk about another woman who was important in my life, a mentor, who I probably haven’t talked to in 20 years. (I know, I’m such an ungrateful bitch. ) Dr. Jane Mercer was not even in the same department as me. My dissertation was…
At first, I was thinking it wasn’t right to have a favorite paper, but then I realized that was idiotic. It’s not like these papers (or their presenters) are my children. My favorite paper was, Statistical modeling for large complex data: Five new directions from SAS/STAT software If you’re not a statistician, props to you…
In the past month, I have been in five cities and three states and met a lot of people. Lately, I’ve had conversations with several families that have adult “children” living at home in their 30s, 40s and even 50s. By then, the children’s girlfriend/boyfriend and children are also living in the home. Often, this…
The nice thing about going to SAS Global Forum is that it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Long after I have gone home, there are still points to ponder. Visual analytics is big and not just in the sense of there is a product out called that which I have never used but that…
If you did not go to SAS Global Forum this week, here are some things you missed: Me, rambling on about the 13 techniques all biostatisticians should know, including the answer to: If McNemar and Kappa are both statistics for handling correlated, categorical data, how can they give you completely different results? The answer is…
Whenever you find yourself overworked or tired out, it’s easy to get upset out of all proportion when something goes wrong. The usual advice to avoiding stress – “Be sure you get enough sleep. Work-life balance is important.” – can be like telling runners at a track meet to run faster. It is correct but…
It’s almost 6 am here on the east coast, and after flying all day during which I worked on a final report for a grant to develop our latest educational game and make bug fixes on same, I landed and wrote a report for a client, because that pays the bills. In the meantime, over on…
Esteemed statistics guru, Dr. Nathaniel Golden has some sobering news for Democrats. His latest models predict a Republican blow out. As can be seen by the map below, the Republican front-runner has tapped into the mood of resentment in the country’s non-elites. When the dust has settled, only the two highest earning states in the…
There are some things in life that I just have difficulty wrapping my brain around, and one of those is how some people can be so incompetent that they don’t know they’re incompetent. Let’s take the example of people earning doctorates. You’d think that would be a pretty select crowd, right? From 1960 – 69,…
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this before – I’m going to tell you an easy (yes, easy) way to find and communicate to a non-technical audience standardized mortality rates and relative risk by strata. It all starts with PROC STDRATE . No, I take that back. It starts with this post I wrote…