I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite when it comes to documentation. In every staff meeting, I emphasize documenting whatever code you have written that week, but I always put off doing it myself. My excuse is always that it isn’t final and when I get the complete project done I will put it in the wiki….
Everyone should pause every now and then and ask themselves this question: What would you want to be doing if you weren’t doing this? Whatever “this” is, your answer will be revealing. If you excitedly exclaim, “I would start a restaurant, using my grandma’s recipes, but it would be more of a modern look –…
The heroine in Labyrinth (fun movie, by the way) complains , “That’s not fair!” and the Goblin King responds, “You say that so often. I wonder what your standard of comparison is.” Sunday evening and I’m taking a break from working on our latest game to offer another installment in Mama AnnMaria’s Guide on Not…
In the past, I have questioned the extent to which we really suck at math in the U.S. While I’m still a bit skeptical that the average child in developing countries is doing dramatically better than children in the U.S., one thing is pretty clear from our results to date, and that is that the…
Sometimes, you can know too much programming for your own good. Yesterday, I was working on analyzing a data set and can I just say here that SAS’s inability to handle mixed-type arrays is the bane of my existence. (In case you don’t know, if you mix character and numeric variable types in an array,…
I tell clients on our statistical consulting side all of the time that if your conclusion is only valid if you look at this specific subset of your sample, with this particular statistical technique. You need to look for a convergence or results. Does the mean score increase? Does the proportion of people passing a…
I’m preparing a data set for analysis and since the data are scored by SAS I am double-checking to make sure that I coded it correctly. One check is to select out an item and compare the percentage who answered correctly with the mean score for that item. These should be equal since items are…
Do you have a bunch of sites bookmarked with articles you are going to go back and read later? It’s not just me, is it? One of my (many) favorite things at SAS Global Forum this year was the app. It included a function for emailing links to papers you found interesting. Perhaps the theory…
I think I need some advice on appreciating how great my life is. I haven’t been posting for two weeks, I realized today. First, I got sick and then when I got better, I was so far behind in working on our games that I just squashed bugs and held design meetings for days. Now,…
We’ve looked at data on Body Mass Index (BMI) by race. Now let’s take a look at our sample another way. Instead of using BMI as a variable, let’s use obesity as a dichotomous variable, defined as a BMI greater than 30. It just so happened (really) that this variable was already in the data…