My work day started with a call on research design and ended ten hours later after I fixed a program that wasn’t working. I just resigned from my position as senior statistical consultant at a major research university so that I could concentrate on research. I’m on the technical staff on several projects, have a…
I probably hadn’t thought about canonical correlation in twenty years, but then a problem came up this week where it was the exact technique I needed. What made me laugh, though, is the particular problem I was dealing with twenty years ago had school achievement measures – tests of English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies…
A friend of mine mentioned that a woman had invited him to her apartment. Let me just say that my friend does not exactly rival Mother Teresa for celibacy. Astounded, I asked him why he hadn’t taken her up on the offer. He answered that his son had died recently and he didn’t want to…
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…