Anyone who claims to know all of SAS is clinically insane – Ernest Hemingway (not intended to be a factual attribution) Okay, I admit it, Hemingway didn’t really say that, but he would have, except for being dead and all. As usual, this year I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted at the…
At the opening session, Randy Guard from SAS talked about making a difference. That sounded promising, but then the examples he gave were how analyses could be run on large databases of stock market data so much more quickly that instead of having market value overnight traders could get the data hourly. It sounded like…
I’m teaching a class on categorical data analysis after the Western Users of SAS Software conference next week. As always, I have WAY more information than I can cover. Handouts are limited to 40 pages so I sent the organizers 80 slides but I know I am going to cover way more than that. Why…
This is one of those things that is obvious after someone points it out to you and you smack your head saying, “Of course! I knew that.” As I was going through everything I have to say about analyzing categorical data trying to winnow it down to a three-hour workshop for the WUSS conference (Western…
I am probably going to hell for this … because today I was studying the death rate of older people using the data from Kaiser Permanente available on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website and really having a great time. Reading .stc First funny thing, after I extracted it and noticed…
This month was my 14th wedding anniversary. For some reason, a number of my close friends and relatives chose this occasion to tell me that they had bet this marriage would not last more than five years. Which got me to thinking about survival analysis …. (whether or not it should have gotten me to…
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….
I met Corinna when she was a member of the 1996 Olympic team. In the intervening 15 years she has had a battle with mental illness – or maybe I should say, the mental health system. This article is re-posted, with permission, from her blog, where she writes about mental illness, mental health, motivational speaking,…
Getting an MRS degree is an effective strategy. You care about conditional distributions even if you don’t know what they are. When I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1970s, nearly all of my friends (and the vast majority…
The Agresti and Finlay book, Statistical methods in the social sciences , has a nice section on bivariate descriptive statistics. (And thank you to the person on twitter who recommended that book. I apologize that I can’t remember who it was.) I got to thinking about that today, especially with regard to categorical data. Often…