As further proof that God has a sense of humor, my career has been full of reversals. Where I was once the pain-in-the-ass young hotshot who knew everything and thought my boss was stuck in the past century, now I have to deal with people like that. For my first few years as an employee,…
Some people may have said that hackathons are a stupid ass idea where a bunch of people who have can’t afford to buy their own pizza spend 48 hours with a bunch of strangers and no showers. Okay, well, maybe that was me. I take it all back. We kicked off our hackathon at noon…
In case you don’t know, SAS On-Demand is the FREE , as in free beer, offering of SAS for academic use. How good is it? There really can’t be one answer to that. First of all, there are multiple options – SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Enterprise Guide, JMP, etc. so some may be…
It has been a while since I wrote on this topic, which, as I explained initially, was going to be a blog category called “Mama AnnMaria’s Advice on Not Getting Your Ass Fired” but it turned out out that doesn’t fit in the sidebar. It was suggested to me this week by a couple of…
Physicians say that once a patient hears the word “cancer”, their brain shuts down and they don’t hear anything else. To be fair to the patients, understanding survival statistics isn’t always simple. Let’s take just one example: The three-year survival rate is different from the third-year survival rate. If you have been told that the…
It is unnecessarily cold at 6 a.m. in Minneapolis in the middle of February, just in case you were wondering. If you know me at all, you know that two of the things I hate most in this world are getting up early and cold weather. Despite that, I’m pretty satisfied this morning. I have…
Kappa is a useful measure of agreement between two raters. Say you have two radiologists looking at X-rays, rating them as normal or abnormal and you want to get a quantitative measure of how well they agree. Kappa is your go-to coefficient. How do you compute it? Well, personally, I use SAS because this is…
As you have no doubt cleverly deduced from the title, this is the second installment in my series, “Mama AnnMaria’s Advice on How Not to Get Your Ass Fired.” In Part 1, I explained why employees who (in their view) never make mistakes end up getting their asses fired. Today’s lesson is: Understand that your boss…
Listen my dears and you will learn the difference between incidence and prevalence and why effective treatment for a disease may mean that more people have it. Prevalence is the number of people in the population who have a disease. It is computed as Number of people with disease X 1,000 Number in population…
You’d think the ultimate example of simplicity in measurement would be mortality rate. Count up the dead people – they aren’t hard to catch. Divide by the total number of people you had when you started. Done. It’s not super complicated but it is slightly more complicated than that. First of all, how do you…