Today, I wanted to find the confidence interval for the difference between two proportions. I have SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Excel and God knows what else laying around. I did not want to go to the effort of plugging the numbers into a calculator, but it really is a pretty straightforward formula, so you would…
Yesterday and the day before, I gave an example of using SAS to sort student responses into the class they were in using the DATEPART function, TIMEPART function and a few DO-loops. After making sure my code runs, I decided it was pretty redundant and thus a classic case for a macro. What I want…
Any time you find yourself writing the same code over and over, you should be either thinking of a DO loop or a macro. Here is an example that jumped out at me yesterday. The problem was this: Every time a student answers a question in our game, it is stored in our database. After…
While I believe SAS Enterprise Guide was developed to make statistical analysis easier for non-programmers, it is also a useful tool for experienced programmers. Often, I find myself thinking, “I KNOW there is a function that does that ….” but I just can’t remember exactly what it is. Take today as an example. I have…
I’m never going to understand the idea that start-ups are for young people. It is like the ads you see where people want a 25-year-old with 15 years of experience, you know, “Expert in C++, systems administration, Linux, Windows, SAS, R, Hadoop, Ruby, Python and Java. Must have 5-plus years experience in development for mobile…
Twenty-eight years ago, I won the world judo championships. Unlike almost everyone else who accomplishes that feat, I did NOT go into running a judo school, selling martial arts supplies, or, more recently, mixed martial arts. Photo courtesy of Hans Gutknecht of the Los Angeles Daily News On the contrary, I immediately went into a…
Several times on this blog, I have mentioned that the most common errors I make, and most programmers*, are the simple things like typing or forgetting to close a bracket or tag. Many of those errors are now automatically fixed by the intellisense of various IDEs (Integrated Development Environment), like Webstorm, but they still pop…
I’ve been somewhat of a fan of SAS On-Demand for Academics, but there are two problems. One is that it runs slow and the other is that it doesn’t run native on a Mac at all. Enter the SAS Web Editor. I just started using it yesterday and so far, I love it. It is…
For reasons I may explain later – or maybe not – I decided to analyze the TIMSS data, which is Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Use a colon: Nifty tip #1 ** Ran this first *** libname LIB ‘C:\TIMSS2007\Data’; proc contents data = lib.G4_ACHIEVE07; *** Modified to only keep math items ; data lib.G4_ACHIEVE07;…
I’ve been fairly positive about SAS On-demand but I think the keyword in that sentence is “fairly”. One of the major advantages of SAS over R (which has no formal tech support) and SPSS (which, before it was bought by IBM you could wait 45 minutes on hold for tech support) is that if you…