Any person who claims to know all of SAS is either clinically insane or a liar. However, that is not you. YOU are reading this book. Based on this one fact, I can conclude a couple of things about you. First, you know the basics of SAS. You can code a DATA step. You have…
Yesterday, I talked about using a macro for beginning checks on data quality and I promised to explain it today. So, here we go… options mstored sasmstore = maclib ; If you want to store your macro, you need to use two options in the OPTIONS statement. MSTORED that you want the stored compiled macros…
I used to think that a clean house was a sign of a wasted life. After all, why would anyone spend time cleaning when they could be reading, writing, teaching, running, programming, doing judo or drinking margaritas at the pier watching the sun go down? Well, I still don’t alphabetize my spices or clean the…
The new structural equation modeling for JMP is pretty cool. It’s unfortunate that it requires both JMP and SAS/STAT to run it, the cost of the two combined being so expensive that you pretty much have to work for a huge organization that can afford a site license for both or sell a kidney to…
Mr. Chips is dead – and I think I helped to kill him. There has been a lot of backlash directed at universities over the past few decades. Some of it is very blatant – like the Wisconsin legislators who want copies of a faculty member’s email, or the Georgia legislators who attributed their university…
True confessions: I just don’t get the data hackathon I am old. If I was not aware of this by looking at my U.S. birth certificate (which, like President Obama, I do have), I have America’s most spoiled thirteen-year-old to tell me, “You’re old.” (sometimes followed by – “and stupid” if I have just told…
From time to time I get asked, “Can you recommend a book like Structural Equation Modeling for Dummies?” My unspoken thought is always, “You’re f***ing kidding me, right?” SEM isn’t the sort of thing done by dummies. Well, ask no more if you want straightforward, basic treatment of CALIS – the SAS procedure for structural…
As my lovely oldest daughter, noted, most of what most people turn out to be, for better or for worse, they owe to their mothers. Family legend has it that my mother, a former Catholic nun, former second grade teacher, was bored sitting home in Karachi, West Pakistan while my father worked on the Air…
Occasionally it has seemed to me that I see things a little differently than other people. Several years ago, I was co-authoring a paper on outcomes for married people with mental retardation. My co-author was an extremely intelligent person with far more knowledge of the issue than me. Looking at the first set of figures,…
I was going to write about the log of odds ratios and explain logarithms. This is the very, very odd fact I have noticed in most of social science – people in doctoral programs are often thrust into statistics course for which they really don’t have the basic mathematical foundation. This is because if they…