Being a professor can build humility. About twenty years ago, I was teaching the third course in the statistics sequence required of all graduate students. The second course had been taught by an adjunct professor, which was FAR less common then than it is now (that’s a whole different post). The first day I started…
I’m at Seattle this week, at SAS Global Forum, and it is even greater than usual. I go to several conferences each year, some because I am presenting, some because there is a topic that particularly interests me, but there are three I go to every year. Of these, SAS Global Forum is the one…
Easter. It being Easter weekend I have tried not to do too much work. The world’s most spoiled twelve-year-old has assisted in this goal insisting she needed to be taken shopping for books, nail polish and things to put in the Easter baskets. Since two of her sisters are in their twenties we need more…
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,…
So, thanks to the wonderful Heidi Johnson of SAS Tech Support I have finally successfully installed SAS Enterprise Miner 6.1 . I had major problems installing Enterprise Miner on any virtual machine. So, I did what I always do in these situations. I went back to the most plain vanilla no-frills thing I could possibly…
Cluster analysis is one of those techniques I don’t get to use very often. About once every couple of years someone will be doing a study of types of companies, patients or clients and have a need for a cluster analysis. The best description I read of cluster analysis came from a book many years…
When you’re a student arguing with a professor about some topic in the field, there is always the presumption that you’re wrong and the professor is right. While statistically, I would say the odds do favor that position, it seems dramatically unfair to the student at the time, especially if she is not inclined to…
I stole that name from Chris Hemedinger for “The Missing Manual” because I thought it was hilarious. If you don’t program in SAS much then you probably did not think immediately, “Oh, . is the symbol for missing numeric data, how funny.” In fact, you are probably more like my daughter, Maria Burns Ortiz, who…
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.” It sounds as if Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the…
Last week, a couple of really sharp cookies from JMP were on campus giving a presentation and their academic program manager, Curt Hinrchs commented that what is really needed is a course on statistical thinking. I think he is absolutely on to something. I mentioned in my last post how there is a debate over…