Some people may have said that hackathons are a stupid ass idea where a bunch of people who have can’t afford to buy their own pizza spend 48 hours with a bunch of strangers and no showers. Okay, well, maybe that was me. I take it all back. We kicked off our hackathon at noon…
In case you don’t know, SAS On-Demand is the FREE , as in free beer, offering of SAS for academic use. How good is it? There really can’t be one answer to that. First of all, there are multiple options – SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Enterprise Guide, JMP, etc. so some may be…
Kappa is a useful measure of agreement between two raters. Say you have two radiologists looking at X-rays, rating them as normal or abnormal and you want to get a quantitative measure of how well they agree. Kappa is your go-to coefficient. How do you compute it? Well, personally, I use SAS because this is…
Our Project Manager, Jessica, made the very insightful comment at lunch the other day, No one cares how hard it was for you to make. When people are looking to buy your product, all they want to know is what it will do for them. That young woman has a bright future in marketing. Unfortunately…
I think descriptive statistics are under-rated. One reason I like Leon Gordis’ Epidemiology book is that he agrees with me. He says that sometimes statistics pass the “inter-ocular test”. That is, they hit you right between the eyes. I’m a big fan of eye-balling statistics and SAS/GRAPH is good for that. Let’s take this example….
Frequently, I hear adults who should know better argue against learning something, whether it is algebra, analysis of variance or learning a programming language. They say, I’m 47 years old and I’ve never used (insert thing I didn’t learn here). Yes, that is true. However, if you had learned it, there is a good chance…
I read a lot. This year, I finished 308 books on my Kindle app, another dozen on iBooks, a half-dozen on ebrary and 15 or 20 around the house. I don’t read books on paper very often any more. It’s not too practical for me. I go through them at the rate of about a book…
There may come a day (shudder) when I am called upon to find what my mother refers to as “a real job”. I’m not sure how I would go about it. For the past 30 years, here is how my career has gone. I was walking in the door at the university where I had…
What if you wanted to turn your PROC MIXED into a repeated measures ANOVA using PROC GLM. Why would you want to do this? Well, I don’t know why you would want to do it but I wanted to do it because I wanted to demonstrate for my class that both give you the same…
Any time you learn anything new it can be intimidating. That is true of programming as well as anything else. It may be even more true of using statistical software because you combine the uneasiness many people have about learning statistics with learning a new language. To a statistician, this error message makes perfect sense:…