I’m giving a talk on Preparing Students for the Real World of Data at SAS Global Forum next month. You’d think 50 minutes would be long enough for me to talk, but that just goes to show you don’t know me as well as you think you do. One point made in the template for…
If you came into my office and watched me work today, just before I had you arrested for stalking me, you might notice me doing some things that are the absolute opposite of best practices. I need about 10 datasets for some analyses I’ll be doing for my SAS Global Forum paper. I also want…
Some people may have said that hackathons are a stupid ass idea where a bunch of people who have can’t afford to buy their own pizza spend 48 hours with a bunch of strangers and no showers. Okay, well, maybe that was me. I take it all back. We kicked off our hackathon at noon…
In case you don’t know, SAS On-Demand is the FREE , as in free beer, offering of SAS for academic use. How good is it? There really can’t be one answer to that. First of all, there are multiple options – SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Enterprise Guide, JMP, etc. so some may be…
Kappa is a useful measure of agreement between two raters. Say you have two radiologists looking at X-rays, rating them as normal or abnormal and you want to get a quantitative measure of how well they agree. Kappa is your go-to coefficient. How do you compute it? Well, personally, I use SAS because this is…
Our Project Manager, Jessica, made the very insightful comment at lunch the other day, No one cares how hard it was for you to make. When people are looking to buy your product, all they want to know is what it will do for them. That young woman has a bright future in marketing. Unfortunately…
I think descriptive statistics are under-rated. One reason I like Leon Gordis’ Epidemiology book is that he agrees with me. He says that sometimes statistics pass the “inter-ocular test”. That is, they hit you right between the eyes. I’m a big fan of eye-balling statistics and SAS/GRAPH is good for that. Let’s take this example….
Frequently, I hear adults who should know better argue against learning something, whether it is algebra, analysis of variance or learning a programming language. They say, I’m 47 years old and I’ve never used (insert thing I didn’t learn here). Yes, that is true. However, if you had learned it, there is a good chance…
I read a lot. This year, I finished 308 books on my Kindle app, another dozen on iBooks, a half-dozen on ebrary and 15 or 20 around the house. I don’t read books on paper very often any more. It’s not too practical for me. I go through them at the rate of about a book…
There may come a day (shudder) when I am called upon to find what my mother refers to as “a real job”. I’m not sure how I would go about it. For the past 30 years, here is how my career has gone. I was walking in the door at the university where I had…