A few days ago, I tried installing Enterprise Miner for, I think, the third time. The first time, I could not get it to work, saw we needed something called a planned install for which I needed a plan file which I was to get from my SAS administrator, who happens to be me and…
Normally, things are very quiet in the De Mars household. Being out-numbered by daughters, two to one, my husband and I feel as if we need to maintain a united front against the younger generation. Last night, however, he irritated me. This was unfortunate because this is the man who, when we were dating, was…
My Republican friends, of which I have none, are really not going to like these results. The findings from my latest analysis are not entirely unexpected. Several years ago I attended a bilingual education conference where the keynote speaker was a middle-aged, white, male demographer from Texas. Yes, I was thinking exactly the same as…
Grown-ups lie to kids. I have discovered this. When I was young, my mom did not have a lot of money, and so things like trips to Disneyland, when they occurred at all, were on an extremely tight budget. No buying candy, souvenirs or extras. I swore that when I grew up, went to graduate…
In trying to decide what courses to teach, it is not as simple as looking at what products are used the most because, to some extent, we are looking at the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one calls up and tries to order a product or schedule a class for something that they don’t…
I knew it! I am finally getting some time to finish reading The Black Swan and I came across this statement, “Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that ‘statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones’. ” I have thought this for years. Like most of my…
(Or: Why a computer will not be replacing me any time soon) [Originally, the second half of this was supposed to be an explanation of the real use of multiple imputation which is in estimating parameters but then my daughter came to pick me up early and I got the flu so I am now…
Of course I am most grateful for my family. As daughter number two, a.k. a. , “The Perfect Jennifer”, commented yesterday, “This is the only family I know where everyone in the family actually talks to one another.” It’s true we don’t have any made-for-TV movie problems. No one is in rehab, no divorces, incarcerations,…
Everybody is talking now about the acquisition of SPSS by IBM. So far, having just come back from the SPSS DIrections conference, I can’t say that I have seen a lot of differences yet. There seemed like there were a few more SPSS people at the conference, which is a good thing. In my experience,…
So, I am loving my new computer – 12 GB RAM, dual quad-core and a terabyte of space. Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) plus four VMs with Vista 32, Vista 64, Office 32 and Office 64, plus two enormous monitors so I can run Unix programs on our cluster and monitor that while I am…