Upfront confession – I completely copied the first part of this from a macro Paul Dickman wrote in 1999 because it did ALMOST exactly what I wanted. I tested it several times with different data and on different computers to see that it worked the way I expected. I actually found it on some random…
My initial exposure to Occam’s razor came in my first undergraduate economics class. Perhaps due to my tender years, it made a great impression, and I have tried to apply it ever since. In short, Occam’s razor advises us when presented with competing, plausible choices, the…
In my analysis of data on the oldest old from the Kaiser Permanente study, I started with cigar smoking because I have a friend who turned 65 last month. His annual physical went like this: Doctor: Do you still smoke cigars? Jim: Yep. Doctor: Do you still drink 8 or 9 beers every night? Jim: Yep….
(Yes, that title does sound like a lot of the spam comments I get. ) Last year, at the Gov. 2.0 conference in Santa Monica, Jean Holm, from NASA spoke about some of the opportunities for open data. I left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the best examples she gave were, I thought,…
Before the semester began, I debated about requiring SAS on-demand for my statistics course. In fact, after giving it some thought, I decided to make use optional rather than mandatory. One reason for my hesitation was uncertainty about basing a major part of students’ grades on a project requiring an untested software package. I could…
Continuing on with questions students asked at the end of the semester … Note that the following questions were asking what I personally do, and I answered the same way. These are not rules that anyone has to follow, like taking the square root of the variance to find the standard deviation, but they are,…
Today was a lesson in why one should always be a little leery of mean substitution. I had downloaded a data set to use as a logistic regression example for my class tomorrow. It happened to be the 2010 Monitoring the Future study and I was particularly interested in school drop out. This is a…
Two things, first of all. Those folks in Colorado are unbelievable studs to come out in inches of snow and more falling to a full house at the Denver & northern Colorado / Wyoming SAS users group meeting. I’ll bet the people in North Dakota are…
I’m teaching a class on categorical data analysis after the Western Users of SAS Software conference next week. As always, I have WAY more information than I can cover. Handouts are limited to 40 pages so I sent the organizers 80 slides but I know I am going to cover way more than that. Why…
This month was my 14th wedding anniversary. For some reason, a number of my close friends and relatives chose this occasion to tell me that they had bet this marriage would not last more than five years. Which got me to thinking about survival analysis …. (whether or not it should have gotten me to…