No matter how experienced you are, you will still make the most obvious errors, and sometimes, (if you are me), the more obvious it is the harder it is to spot. I mentioned wasting time trying to figure why my quintiles weren’t exactly 20% each when the answer was pretty obvious. I am getting better,…
Today’s post courtesy of Captain Obvious … To do quintile matching, one must first match by quintiles. Hence, the name. Quintiles divide your data set into five equal, um, fifths. Quint is Latin (or Greek or some other random language) for five. Hence, the name. So, when I did this: PROC UNIVARIATE ; VAR prob…
The Rocket Scientist is opposed to buying software that has licenses activated, on general principle and because we usually have at least six computers between the two of us – a desktop Mac each which are our two main computers, a laptop each for travel, a Windows machine or two for testing. Then there is…
Having failed recently to use BMI as a variable from a data set on school children in our example for propensity score matching, because people who fill out surveys are big, fat liars, we next went to a sample of really old people and used death as a dependent variable Try faking it on the…
I’m taking off for two weeks on a working vacation defined as I will be working while the rest of the family is on vacation. I found it interesting that the list of what I NEEDED to do in getting ready was Go to the Apple store and pick up a 500 GB hard drive….
We are looking for data to use as an example of propensity score matching for a couple of upcoming workshop / classes. Since the data I have used previously belonged to other people, I needed to come up with an example that could be stated in a format something like: Controlling for X, Y and…
Oddly, Sandra Scarr, author of both the seminal study on IQs of black children adopted into white homes and the book on child care, “Mother care/other care” gave this advice to working mothers. I quoted her years ago in a chapter I wrote for a book used in Freshman 101 courses. The title (of the…
Years ago, I happened to be at a meeting where two well-known African-American researchers were speaking. Like many conferences, there were “round table” luncheons with the famous people that you could attend. I forgot what the topic was supposed to be, but there were a couple of young African-American women at the table and somehow…
When I send bills to clients, I often, both for their information and mine, include the initials for the staff members being charged to that project. Of course, people are charged at different rates and this helps us internally keep track of who is being charged to what project and also allows us to easily…
I learned at St. Mary’s Catholic School that envy was a sin. Good thing I am going to mass on Thursday, because I am suffering from a good deal of envy lately. First there is blog envy. If you have not checked out The Berkeley Blog, I highly recommend it, starting with this post on…