I stole that name from Chris Hemedinger for “The Missing Manual” because I thought it was hilarious. If you don’t program in SAS much then you probably did not think immediately, “Oh, . is the symbol for missing numeric data, how funny.” In fact, you are probably more like my daughter, Maria Burns Ortiz, who…
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.” It sounds as if Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the…
Last week, a couple of really sharp cookies from JMP were on campus giving a presentation and their academic program manager, Curt Hinrchs commented that what is really needed is a course on statistical thinking. I think he is absolutely on to something. I mentioned in my last post how there is a debate over…
Two or three lifetimes ago, I was an Associate Professor at a small, liberal arts college, teaching, among other things, lifespan developmental psychology because, well, somebody needed to teach it and I had published several articles on assessment of families and other semi-related issues. One debate in the field, I learned, was how much of…
A few days ago, I tried installing Enterprise Miner for, I think, the third time. The first time, I could not get it to work, saw we needed something called a planned install for which I needed a plan file which I was to get from my SAS administrator, who happens to be me and…
The other day I needed to have a job run daily. My two efforts at solving this problem failed. These were: 1. Ask the six people hanging around for no particular reason how to do it. All vaguely remembered learning that at some point and had forgotten specifically how to do it. 2. Using Google…
I have long suspected that the main role of other people on this earth is to annoy me. Take FIPS codes. FIPS stands for “Federal Information Processing Standard”. Does no one know the meaning of the word “standard” ? A FIPS code is a useful thing. For counties it is a FIVE digit code. Got…
Normally, things are very quiet in the De Mars household. Being out-numbered by daughters, two to one, my husband and I feel as if we need to maintain a united front against the younger generation. Last night, however, he irritated me. This was unfortunate because this is the man who, when we were dating, was…
My Republican friends, of which I have none, are really not going to like these results. The findings from my latest analysis are not entirely unexpected. Several years ago I attended a bilingual education conference where the keynote speaker was a middle-aged, white, male demographer from Texas. Yes, I was thinking exactly the same as…
Grown-ups lie to kids. I have discovered this. When I was young, my mom did not have a lot of money, and so things like trips to Disneyland, when they occurred at all, were on an extremely tight budget. No buying candy, souvenirs or extras. I swore that when I grew up, went to graduate…