I thought it would be really interesting today to get back to looking at SAS Enterprise Miner, especially the text mining. I thought it would be cool to take another look at Statistica. I also thought it would be cool to finish a blog post I started on power analysis for mixed models. And I…
I decided I need to learn a new language. I had learned a number of languages in the past but SAS is the only one I used on a daily basis. I write SPSS syntax about every other day (does that count?). I toyed with Ruby and C++. I listened, bemusedly, to people who exhorted…
I looked on my calendar and there was a reminder that a month from now I will be in Nova Scotia. I try to get in my travel to anywhere north of Santa Barbara between May and October due to a near-fatal allergy to cold weather. I’m looking forward to this trip, for a few…
At SAS Global Forum, someone commented to me that he was stunned at the number of people who were unfamiliar with a c:\ Yes, young people, when us oldsters say “c prompt” we are not talking about a cool shellfish Nope, my dears, in Windows, we expect you to go to that window start menu,…
Since I was a female engineer over thirty years ago, I’ve seen quite a bit of change for women in technology. Still, both then and now, a common complaint is about how women are held back by lack of mentors. Now, being on the other side of the desk, I can see one possible reason…
It occurred to me today that I could not remember ever meeting another Hispanic statistician and I got to wondering how many Hispanic statisticians there actually are. I started with Google, source of all knowledge. I found a blog post from two years ago that said there were 12 Hispanics out of 15,904 members of…
Because I have written a lot of grant proposals and reviewed a lot of proposals, every time that commercial comes on at 3 a.m. saying, “The government wants to give you free money!” I want to do an Elvis impersonation and shoot my TV. The government does not want to give you money. You have…
I’d always found the SPSS help pretty basic, so I don’t even consider it when looking for information. However, courtesy of the UCLA Academic Computing Group, which has a bunch of the SPSS case studies on-line, I found this one on mixed models. It really is one of the most straight-forward explanations of mixed models,…
Generally, when the school principal calls, it’s not a good sign. When the call begins, “I’m sure you weren’t expecting this …” … it’s usually an even worse sign. In this case, however, he had called to say that The Spoiled One was being recommended for a scholarship to a boarding school. We had never…
Want to start a business? Think you’re a good programmer? Have a good design? (By a good design, I don’t mean an idea, I mean pages of scene, character and action description if it’s a game, plus – well, let’s just say one HELL of a lot more than “there should be an app for…