New semester coming up when I will be teaching data mining. Because I never do anything at the last minute, I’m registering my course and testing the SAS on-demand for Enterprise Miner now. I have learned from experience not to ignore it when the instructions say to check your configuration. You should find how to…
During the time since I started this series of posts on a little thing I knocked out one evening to illustrate long division, I’ve probably done a dozen other somewhat interesting pieces of code – I am sad that Java has co-opted the use of the word codelet because it is such a nice term for…
Yesterday I posted the code to get the problem, now here is where we check it. As I said yesterday, may way of programming is to knock out something that works and then go back and make it work better, like a first draft for a journal article. So, this is my first draft. Keep…
You’d think it would be easy to find source code for a simple applet to demonstrate long division with a one-digit divisor and two-digit quotient. I wanted it to show the steps in long division, with the product for the first digit in the quotient shown, then that subtracted from the dividend, and the next…
Getting ready to teach a data mining course at the end of the year, I started looking through data sets I have on my desktop. Not sure what I will end up using. My first lesson, no matter what, is going to be on data quality. The very first thing I did was a series…
I can imagine the type of person served by an expensive, intensive programming bootcamp – someone with money (or, at least, good credit) and several weeks of free time. That has never described me in my life. The last time I had six weeks free was in the summer after tenth grade, before I started…
Since there is a blizzard and I’m inside analyzing data, I thought it was a good time for another random SAS tip. The default output type for SAS 9.4 is HTML, which is nice for presentation and sharing, but sometimes I would like a plain text output, especially if I’m going to be doing…
This week I had one of those pain-in-the-ass problems. I had a test with 24 items but they were of mixed types. That is, for some the answer was multiple choice and for others it was numbers. The data was received as an Excel file. Now, I could have opened it with SAS Enterprise Guide…
I read a blog post where the author said the women who dropped out of programming “should have been discouraged” because it’s not for everyone and many women try to use smiles and flattery to get men to do their work for them. I actually have had the experience the author cites, but with both…
One of the many questions on start-up accelerator applications that make me go “Hmm”, is this question : How many lines of code have you written? I have heard of, but thankfully never worked at, organizations that evaluated their technical staff by the lines of code written. Let me give you two stories that illustrate…