In my analysis of data on the oldest old from the Kaiser Permanente study, I started with cigar smoking because I have a friend who turned 65 last month. His annual physical went like this: Doctor: Do you still smoke cigars? Jim: Yep. Doctor: Do you still drink 8 or 9 beers every night? Jim: Yep….
(Yes, that title does sound like a lot of the spam comments I get. ) Last year, at the Gov. 2.0 conference in Santa Monica, Jean Holm, from NASA spoke about some of the opportunities for open data. I left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the best examples she gave were, I thought,…
Before the semester began, I debated about requiring SAS on-demand for my statistics course. In fact, after giving it some thought, I decided to make use optional rather than mandatory. One reason for my hesitation was uncertainty about basing a major part of students’ grades on a project requiring an untested software package. I could…
It is not every day that my refrigerator provides insight into a statistical problem. My daughter gave me this magnet. BIRTHDAYS ARE GOOD FOR YOU. STATISTICS SHOW THAT PEOPLE WHO HAVE THE MOST BIRTHDAYS LIVE THE LONGEST. which led to my thoughts on life expectancy using open data. Kaiser Permanente collected data on two cohorts…
Let the buyer beware – that phrase certainly applies to open data, as does the less historical but equally true statement that students always want to work with real data until they get some. Lately, I have had students working with two different data sets that have led me to the inevitable conclusion that self-report…
Let me just say off the bat that open data is awesome and there should be more of it available. This semester, I have been using SAS On-Demand in my statistics class and creating the data sets to meet students’ interests. Despite some people’s aspersions that I read on Twitter that some statisticians know no…
Admit it, more than once you have thought to yourself, Wouldn’t it be convenient about now to have some mindless minions to do my bidding? I’d always thought if this whole statistical consulting thing didn’t work out, I could be an evil scientist. I mean, I already went to the trouble to get a Ph.D….
The census now allows more than one race to be checked. For many years, friends of mine in inter-racial couples when they registered their children for school would check the “Other” box for race, rather than pick black or white. Although an individual’s census form responses are confidential, you certainly are free to tell anyone…
Lately, I’ve been missing some of my former colleagues at the USC Medical School. This is not just because they are super-nice people, which they are, but also because they used to ask for different types of statistics, and I do think variety is the spice of life – except for in marital relationships where…
Yesterday, I talked about using a macro for beginning checks on data quality and I promised to explain it today. So, here we go… options mstored sasmstore = maclib ; If you want to store your macro, you need to use two options in the OPTIONS statement. MSTORED that you want the stored compiled macros…