Any time you learn anything new it can be intimidating. That is true of programming as well as anything else. It may be even more true of using statistical software because you combine the uneasiness many people have about learning statistics with learning a new language. To a statistician, this error message makes perfect sense:…
In August, I attended a class at Unite 2014 (on Unity game development) and the presenter said, “And some of you, your code won’t run and you’ll swear you did exactly what was shown in the examples. But, of course, all of the rest of us will know that is not true.” This perfectly describes…
Computing confidence intervals is one of the areas where beginning statistics students have the most trouble. It is not as difficult if you break it down into steps, and if you use SAS or other statistical software. Here are the steps: 1. Compute the statistic of interest– that is mean, proportion, difference between means 2….
SAS Enterprise Miner – Free, on a Mac – Bet You Didn’t See That Coming … but how the hell do you get your data on it? I wanted to test SAS Text Miner and was surprised to find the university did not have a license. No problem – and it really was, astoundingly, no…
Am I missing something here? All of the macros I have seen for the parallel analysis criterion for factor analysis look pretty complicated, but, unless I am missing something, it is a simple deal. The presumption is this: There isn’t a number like a t-value or F-value to use to test if an eigenvalue is…
I was reading a book on PHP just to get some ideas for a re-design I’m doing for a client, when I thought of this. Although I think of PHP as something you use to put stuff into a database and take it out – Â data entry of client records, reports of total sales –…
Today, I was thinking about using data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey to try to predict type of hospital admission. Is it true that some people use the emergency room as their primary method of care? Mostly, I wanted to poke around wit the NHDS data and get to know it better for possible…
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. One thing that can drive programmers insane is doing the same thing over again and GETTING different results. In a past life, working in tech support, I learned that whenever anyone calls and says, I did it exactly like your…
When I was running out to the airport, I said I would explain how to get a single plot of all of your scatter plots with SAS. Let’s see if I can get this posted before the plane lands. Not likely but you never know … It’s super simple proc sgscatter data=sashelp.heart ; matrix ageatdeath…
My life is upside down. All day, as my job, I spent writing a program to get a little man to run around a maze, come out the other end and have a new screen come up with a math challenge question. Then, in the evening, I’m surfing the web for interesting bits to read…