At the opening session, Randy Guard from SAS talked about making a difference. That sounded promising, but then the examples he gave were how analyses could be run on large databases of stock market data so much more quickly that instead of having market value overnight traders could get the data hourly. It sounded like…
I am probably going to hell for this … because today I was studying the death rate of older people using the data from Kaiser Permanente available on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website and really having a great time. Reading .stc First funny thing, after I extracted it and noticed…
In case you don’t know – SAS On-Demand is the “cloud-based” version of SAS for teaching and research at universities. That’s a fancy way of saying it runs on the SAS servers and it’s free. Lately I have been happily working with SAS On-Demand for academics so I was a bit surprised speaking with someone…
1. It’s free. Some people say this is just the evil corporate answer to R. Maybe. Probably. I don’t care. I don’t see Microsoft giving me anything for free. 2. It’s pretty easy for an instructor to get an account. I presume SAS verifies your instructor account. First you need a SAS Profile https://www.sas.com/profile/user/create.htm Then…
Given that I taught my first statistics course in something like 1987 , it’s surprising how much I am looking forward to teaching this fall. I gave up being a full-time professor in 1997. Both my academic career and my consulting business were requiring my undivided attention and I had to choose one. I’ve never…
I’ve forgotten more about statistical software than you’ll ever know! I don’t know why people ever say this in a bragging tone because I consider that to be my problem. I’ve forgotten it. Today, I needed to do a confirmatory factor analysis with someone using AMOS. They wanted it in AMOS so that is what…
Getting my papers written for the 2011 Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) meeting . All three papers are in the SAS Essentials strand, which is designed to provide a jump start in their career for relatively new programmers. I’ve given some version of this talk a few times before, and I sometimes think it…
I have learned not to be too smart for my own good. Yesterday was an example. My client provides many different types of services to the consumers who use their program. There are about 15 different options, from counseling to on-the-job training to assistive technology. We want to get the total number of services each…
Been working with SAS a lot lately to get the data in shape for a new client. Here’s one of the problems I ran across. We want to get the average pay rate for people who got jobs as a result of our client’s services. However, when one of the people they served did not…
When people ask me what type of statistical software to use, I run through the advantages and disadvantages, but always conclude, “Of course, whatever you choose is going to give you the same results. It’s not as if you’re going to get a F-value of 67.24 with SAS and one of 2.08 with Stata. Your…