I’ve been pretty pleased with SAS Studio (the product formerly known as SAS Web Editor), so when Jodi sent me an email with information about using a virtual machine for the multivariate statistics course, I was a bit skeptical. Every time I’ve had to use a remote desktop connection virtual machine for SAS it has…
The new common core standards have statistics first taught in the sixth grade, or so they say. I disagree with this statement because as I see it, much of the basis of statistics is taught in the earlier grades, although not called by that name. Here are just a few examples: Bar graphs Line plots…
Sometimes the benefits of attending a conference aren’t so much the specific sessions you attend as the ideas they spark. One example was at the Western Users of SAS Software conference last week. I was sitting in a session on PROC PHREG and the presenter was talking about analyzing the covariance matrix when it hit…
The second time I taught statistics, I supplemented the textbook with assignments using real data, and I have been doing it in the twenty-eight years since. The benefits seem so obvious to me that it’s hard to believe that everyone doesn’t do the same. The only explanation I can imagine is that they are not…
Visual literacy, being the word chooser of this blog, I have decided means the ability to “read” graphic information. A post I saw today on Facebook earnings over time gave a prime example of this. If you are a fluent “visualizer”, then just like a fluent reader can read a paragraph and comprehend it,…
When we started the Dakota Learning Project to evaluate our educational games, I wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew. We proposed to develop the games, pilot them in schools, collect data and analyze the data to see if the games had any impact. We were also going to go back…
More notes from the text mining class. … This is the article I mentioned in the last post, on Singular Value Decomposition ftp://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/EMiner/TamingTextwiththeSVD.pdf Contrary to expectations, I did find time to read it, on the ride back from Las Vegas and it is surprisingly accessible even to people who don’t have a graduate degree in statistics,…
Maybe this is obvious, but I have often found that what is obvious to some people is not so obvious to others, so here are a few random tips. 1. Enterprise Miner can take a REALLY long time to load during which you wonder if anything is happening at all. Open up the task manager…
After all of the effort to get Enterprise Miner installed, I thought it better do something good. It is interesting to use. Unlike programming where you can get a program to run but give you errors or unexpected results, so far (key phrase!), with Enterprise Miner I have found the problem to be knowing exactly…
Most likely, you,too, have experienced homicidal urges when confronted with a problem you have spent five hours trying to solve on your computer, only to call tech support and have them report, Well, it works fine on my computer. You’d think if that solved the problem that they would offer to box up their computer and send…