I am probably going to hell for this … because today I was studying the death rate of older people using the data from Kaiser Permanente available on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website and really having a great time. Reading .stc First funny thing, after I extracted it and noticed…
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…
Admit it, more than once you have thought to yourself, Wouldn’t it be convenient about now to have some mindless minions to do my bidding? I’d always thought if this whole statistical consulting thing didn’t work out, I could be an evil scientist. I mean, I already went to the trouble to get a Ph.D….
I met Corinna when she was a member of the 1996 Olympic team. In the intervening 15 years she has had a battle with mental illness – or maybe I should say, the mental health system. This article is re-posted, with permission, from her blog, where she writes about mental illness, mental health, motivational speaking,…
Getting an MRS degree is an effective strategy. You care about conditional distributions even if you don’t know what they are. When I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1970s, nearly all of my friends (and the vast majority…
The Agresti and Finlay book, Statistical methods in the social sciences , has a nice section on bivariate descriptive statistics. (And thank you to the person on twitter who recommended that book. I apologize that I can’t remember who it was.) I got to thinking about that today, especially with regard to categorical data. Often…
In case you don’t know – SAS On-Demand is the “cloud-based” version of SAS for teaching and research at universities. That’s a fancy way of saying it runs on the SAS servers and it’s free. Lately I have been happily working with SAS On-Demand for academics so I was a bit surprised speaking with someone…
1. It’s free. Some people say this is just the evil corporate answer to R. Maybe. Probably. I don’t care. I don’t see Microsoft giving me anything for free. 2. It’s pretty easy for an instructor to get an account. I presume SAS verifies your instructor account. First you need a SAS Profile https://www.sas.com/profile/user/create.htm Then…
PROC UNIVARIATE is for numeric data. I use it a lot of times as the first step in my categorical data analyses. How weird is that? Okay, well, maybe it’s not leafy sea dragon level of strange but it does seem an odd thing to do. After all, much of the output that PROC UNIVARIATE…
Given that I taught my first statistics course in something like 1987 , it’s surprising how much I am looking forward to teaching this fall. I gave up being a full-time professor in 1997. Both my academic career and my consulting business were requiring my undivided attention and I had to choose one. I’ve never…