This is why: A. I support affirmative action B. I think some kids succeed in math and science while most don’t. For the past several days, this call has been heard in our house at least once every five minutes, “Mom! Dad! I need help!” It is science project time for the sixth grade at…
I have been trying to get ready for two workshops this summer. One is called Visual Data with SPSS (pretty obvious what it is about). The second one is statistics using SAS Enterprise Guide. I was going to call the first course Statistics without Numbers and the second one Statistics without Programming. A colleague pointed…
I failed art in junior high school. When I tell people that, people who actually have artistic talent, they look at me in disbelief and say, “No one fails art. That’s one of the great things about art. How could you possibly fail art?” The answer is that I was very, very bad at it….
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…