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…
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…
I’m just heading off to the Western Users of SAS Software meeting that starts tomorrow. After the keynote, during which I have promised not to swear even once, I’m doing a SAS Essentials talk on Thursday, where I teach students 10 basic steps that allow them to complete an entire annual report project. One of…
Lately, I’ve been working on a report that uses eight datasets that all have the same problems with the usernames. In addition to needing to remove every username that contained the word “test” or “intern” we also needed to delete specific names of the classroom teachers who had played the game. We needed to correct…
A few years ago, I was at the Western Uses of SAS Software conference and renowned statistician Stanley Azen played the piano and sang at the closing ceremony. Briefly, very briefly, I considered beginning my presentation on 10 SAS steps to an annual report, by writing a song, These are a few of my favorite PROCs,…
Finishing up my second paper for WUSS next month and I have been thinking about the usefulness of character functions in a world where it sometimes seems like everyone is just put on this earth to irritate the hell out of me. Take this problem, for example, In analyzing the data for our games, we…
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…
If I had a clone, all of my code would be beautiful. Last week, I was a speaker at the Tribal Disability Conference in Turtle Mountain, where I spoke on starting a business. Then, I went for a site visit at Spirit Lake Vocational Rehabilitation followed by another talk on self-employment at the Tribal Disability…
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…