I cannot believe that it’s been over two months since I’ve written a post. That is the longest I’ve gone in the ten years I have been writing this blog. I read somewhere that the average blog has the lifespan of a fruit fly – after 31 days most people give it up. That seems…
Stop and read this. It may save you whole lot of grief and panic. Maybe you’ve heard that a stolen iPhone is nothing more than a brick. Perhaps you feel as if your data is safe. You have a password and it’s not 123456. You have find my iPhone. Allow me to burst your bubble…
I was going to write more about reading JSON data but that will have to wait because I’m teaching a biostatistics class and I think this will be helpful to them. What’s a codebook? If you are using even a moderately complex data set, you will want a code book. At a minimum, it will…
Sometimes data changes shape and type over time. In my case, we had a game that was given away free as a demo. We saved the player’s game state – that is, the number of points they had, objects they had earned in the game, etc. as a JSON object. Happy Day! The game became…
When I was young and knew everything, I would frequently see procedures or statistics and think, “When am I ever going to use THAT?” That was my thought when I learned about this new procedure to transpose a data set. (It was new then. Keep in mind, I learned SAS when I was pregnant with…
I was reminded today how useful a SAS log can be, even when it doesn’t give you any errors. I’m analyzing data from a study on educational technology in rural schools. The first step is to concatenate 10 different data sets. I want to keep the source of the data, that is, which data set…
I know people who are so obsessive about testing and validating their code to the point they spend more time on testing it than actually writing it and analyzing the output. I said I know people like that, I didn’t say I was one of them. However, it is good practice to validate your SAS…
Some people believe you can say anything with statistics. I don’t believe that is true, unless you flat out lie, but if you are a big fat liar, I am sure you would lie just as much without statistics. However, a point was made today when Marshall and I were discussing, via email, our presentation…
According to that source of all knowledge on the interwebz, Wikipedia, “Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.” Have you ever had a brilliant, super-competent friend who doubted her…
About ROUND(100) years ago, I took a couple of COBOL courses. I never coded anything in COBOL after the classes, but the concept of a table look up has stuck with me. Just like it sounds, this is used when you want to look something up in a table. For example, if I have ICD-10…