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…
Hey, kids, wanna come over after school and study math? The two students we gave this tempting offer stayed until the office closed and we had to leave. It’s been like that all week. This is what kids playing our new math game look like. I would insert a video but it is not so…
Yesterday, I mentioned this problem For 17 girls diagnosed with anorexia, weight change after family therapy was as follows: 11,11, 6, 9, 14, -3, 0, 7, 22, -5 , -4, 13, 13, 9, 4 , 6, 11 Partial results are shown below. Fill in the missing results: And we had gotten the table completed as…
I was grading the quizzes from my Advanced Quantitative Data Analysis class. This is a class of really smart people in a doctoral program at a selective university. And yet, some of them still had problems with the quiz. Therefore, in however many parts I feel like doing, I am going to discuss how to…
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;…