Several interesting random thoughts from JSM: From a session by Freeda Cooner entitled, “Bayesian statistics are powerful, not magical” ways in which Bayes results could be slanted (one hopes unwittingly) were discussed. One point worth repeating is that the validity assumes accurate priors. Kind of obvious, no? Yet, the question is, where did you get…
Seriously, how weird must you be to fall for this shit? Normally spam is just annoying but today I got one that I cannot imagine anyone could be stupid enough to fall for. It was from Woody Allen, who apparently is a big yahoo fan because his email is adaer22@yahoo.com and the reply to is zbgfsgdr@yahoo.com ….
I’m in North Carolina this week at a class for professors on Advanced Predictive Modeling using SAS Enterprise Miner. This is the sort of statement that causes The Spoiled One & Co. to make faces that look like this: Despite my failure to impress fourteen-year-olds, I think the class has been well worth it. I’m…
Tried reading in a file with 360,000+ records times 279 variables with SAS On-Demand using SAS Enterprise Guide. It was on one of my office computers that has a pretty slow Internet connection. I was using a different computer at the time so I just let it run. After 29 minutes, I gave up, did…
These days, about half of my time is spent in management and collaboration, a fourth on writing code for a game and the remaining fourth on statistical analysis. This isn’t how I’d choose to divide my hours if I was in charge of the universe, but, that’s the way it is. Bwoo-ha-ha That is the…
More than once, I have said that I would never hire someone right out of graduate school. My reason is that graduate students come expecting perfect data sets to analyze, with no data entry errors, normal distributions of all variables, no missing data – and a liberal sprinkling of fairy dust to make it all…
Lately, I have been ignoring lots of good advice. I ignored the rocket scientist who told me I write too much about that statistical software thing whatever it is and that maybe I should write about javascript or something else of interest to a broader audience. I ignored my better instincts which told me loud…
My father passed away about 18 months ago. We hadn’t spoken much of the past 40 years, for reasons that aren’t at all important any more. My mother is living alone now for the first time in 57 years, and really did not need two houses, one in Illinois and one in Florida, so she…
With the new SAS On-Demand for Academics, I presume there will be a lot of professors who have a teaching assistant, research assistant or intern preparing the data for examples for their classes. Or, you may be co-authoring a paper with one of your colleagues. Let’s suppose you are working on a SAS Enterprise Guide…
Once upon a time there were statisticians who thought the answer to everything was to be as precise, correct and “bleeding edge” as possible. If their analyses were precise to 12 decimal places instead of 5, of course they were better because as everyone knows , 12 is more than 5 (and statisticians knew it…