If I were in charge of the world, which, sadly, I am not, there would be a requirement that every statistical programmer be issued a pearl like Glinda the Good had, (the good witch in the Oz books). Glinda’s pearl was white if you were telling the truth and black if you were lying. I’d…
All my programs are working today and I am sad. Fortunately for everyone else, but unfortunately for me today, SAS has increasingly automated or semi-automated fixing those errors. It’s unfortunate for me because I wanted to talk about errors and how to fix these. I could create a simulation dataset but I hate doing that….
You know that guy, supposedly a program, in Tron, the one that yells, “I serve the user”. Well, he never met the first lead engineer I worked with. Reading Donald Farmer’s post “Is it really so?”, I was reminded of something that happened decades ago and it was a lesson I never forgot. I was…
The new year is a popular time for blogs to give lists of favorite books one read over the last year. Reading several of these posts did not inspire in me any desire to update my Amazon wish list. Novels really aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t care about any girls who knocked over…
It’s the holidays and people are drifting in and out of the house. Apparently there is lots of sleeping over going on, although no one bothered to ask me. If you lived here when you were a kid and still have a key to the front door, you don’t need to ask. I can see…
People who are following the reverb10 blogs would no doubt be disappointed by today’s post because it has absolutely nothing to do with finding my compass in life, unless life’s compass is possibly nested in a SAS macro. Since I started this blog to write down things I was sure I would want to remember…
On the front page of the Los Angeles Times today was a story about three of the middle schools in Los Angeles serving the highest proportion of students in poverty. My daughter, “The Perfect Jennifer”, did her student teaching at one of the three and teaches at a second. She said to me today, Mom,…
As my lovely oldest daughter, noted, most of what most people turn out to be, for better or for worse, they owe to their mothers. Family legend has it that my mother, a former Catholic nun, former second grade teacher, was bored sitting home in Karachi, West Pakistan while my father worked on the Air…
The reverb10 prompt for today was to sum up 2010 in one word. It reminded me of a kid I used to play with. Her name was Star, her sister’s name was Secret and her brother’s name was Arrow. She said that, after each birth, her mom opened the dictionary at random and whatever word…
I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal on SAS software and CEO Jim Goodnight said, “We’re producing so many new products. [They’re all] in the funnel and we’ve got to get them in production and it’s taking us longer to get them out the door…. A lot of the problems are testing…