Statisticians are good at lots of things but naming is not one of them. If Carl Linnaeus had been a statistician the name for camel would be Horse With Hump and for elephant Really Big Horse with Nose based on the fact that both have four legs and people ride them. Such is the case…
Does moving from being a novice to a not-so-novice programmer mean knowing everything there is to know about PROC TABULATE? Well, yes and no. It would be hard to call someone who knew everything there was to know about SAS ODS or every possible regression procedure in Stata from regress to nlogit a newbie. However,…
Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a future where all plays were performed by robots that had been programmed with the combined characteristics of the world’s best actors. An aspiring actor sadly asked the technician working on the computers to run these robots: “What would you do if they invented a little…
Read a great line in Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin, “It’s not an effort contest, it’s an art contest.” The point being that no one cares how hard you worked, they care how great your product is. Of course, great products tend to result from hard work along the “necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition” lines, but that’s a whole different…
The next time your boss asks what you do all day or why it takes you so long to answer a question, show him or her this … Now, unlike this blog. where I basically drink Chardonnay and say whatever the hell I feel like, when people are paying me for answers, I take my…
I owe Victoria Brookhart an apology. One day, we were in the graduate student lounge discussing research methods and she burst out, “Isn’t this great? Here we are warming ourselves at the fires of knowledge. These are the times we’ll remember our whole lives as the good old days.” The rest of us threw spitballs…
Vista on VMware was running slow. I mean painfully slow. Like, bamboo shoots under your fingernails painful. As in banana slug slow. SAS Enterprise Guide was running SO slow on VMware I had gotten to the point where I would read a book while waiting for it to open, or to view results in a…
This is a blog about blogging. On the fun scale, meta-blogging probably falls midway between metadata and meta-analysis but I am going to do it anyway. In stages, because, just like if it has bullet points it must be serious business, if it has stages, numbers and units you’ve never heard of, like petapixels, it…
Hmm … so, Liz, our finance person is incomparably efficient and unfailingly nice, where I am usually efficient and have a reputation for being correct 97.6% of the time (as someone commented on twitter, if it has decimals in it, it must be true). Between the two of us we just accomplished the impossible task…
Some times documentation can be a little hard to find… You may be aware of the fact that, if you are running SAS 9.2 on a 64-bit Vista or Windows 7 machine the Import Data option from the file menu does not work for Excel files. Per SAS Usage Note 33228: (Courtesy of Peter Ruzsa…