So I say, “There may be some useful information in the text fields. For example, people who use credit to buy commodities, such as meat may differ from people who buy finished goods like clothing who may differ from people who purchase machinery on credit. Perhaps you may want to consider some kind of clustering.”…
SAS Global Forum has the usual required conference amenities. There is a nice hotel. There is swag. See photo below received by knowing trivia answers. Hint: A good place to find the trivia answers in advance is the SAS users blog. It is also good to know the name of the SAS Global Forum chair…
I am an unashamed statistical programming geek. I’m leaving very soon, stopping to visit my mom on the way to SAS Global Forum because 94.7% of all mothers have retired to Florida by age 68. (That is a real statistic. As someone commented about fake boobs – if they exist, they’re real.) I admit it,…
Giving a whole new meaning to “computing in the cloud”, I finished up my paper “A gentle introduction to survival analysis” for the Nevada SAS Users Group from 30,000 feet up using on-board wi-fi and SAS On-demand. I was shocked to find that the performance was much better in-flight. Presumably, if you charge people $12.95…
I read Allen Englehardt’s post this morning, on R vs SAS/SPSS in corporations and it motivated me to set aside my infinite to-do list and write about something I’ve been thinking for a long time. Since Allen writes on R-bloggers, it will surprise no one that his conclusion was that R is preferable to SAS…
When I got married, I owned two houses. I sold both, using the money to pay off my other debts and pay for my daughters’ college. Even though everyone told us we were crazy not to do it, we didn’t buy another house. As my husband said, “Every house, every condo within miles of us…
Does moving from being a novice to a not-so-novice programmer mean knowing everything there is to know about PROC TABULATE? Well, yes and no. It would be hard to call someone who knew everything there was to know about SAS ODS or every possible regression procedure in Stata from regress to nlogit a newbie. However,…
This is a blog about blogging. On the fun scale, meta-blogging probably falls midway between metadata and meta-analysis but I am going to do it anyway. In stages, because, just like if it has bullet points it must be serious business, if it has stages, numbers and units you’ve never heard of, like petapixels, it…
Went to the “See it in SPSS” event at the Westin Bonaventure this week and, as always, it was well done. The two most interesting parts, based on a non-random sample of one, i.e., me, were: What’s new in SPSS (besides the fact that it is now called PASW and owned by IBM)? And the…
You know that feeling after Thanksgiving dinner when you have had all of your favorite foods all at once and are so full that you think you will never eat again. Well, the past week has left my brain like that. Within twelve days, I attended the SPSS Higher Education Road Show at UCLA, then…