Once upon a time there were statisticians who thought the answer to everything was to be as precise, correct and “bleeding edge” as possible. If their analyses were precise to 12 decimal places instead of 5, of course they were better because as everyone knows , 12 is more than 5 (and statisticians knew it…
The Rocket Scientist is opposed to buying software that has licenses activated, on general principle and because we usually have at least six computers between the two of us – a desktop Mac each which are our two main computers, a laptop each for travel, a Windows machine or two for testing. Then there is…
I decided I need to learn a new language. I had learned a number of languages in the past but SAS is the only one I used on a daily basis. I write SPSS syntax about every other day (does that count?). I toyed with Ruby and C++. I listened, bemusedly, to people who exhorted…
At SAS Global Forum, someone commented to me that he was stunned at the number of people who were unfamiliar with a c:\ Yes, young people, when us oldsters say “c prompt” we are not talking about a cool shellfish Nope, my dears, in Windows, we expect you to go to that window start menu,…
I’d always found the SPSS help pretty basic, so I don’t even consider it when looking for information. However, courtesy of the UCLA Academic Computing Group, which has a bunch of the SPSS case studies on-line, I found this one on mixed models. It really is one of the most straight-forward explanations of mixed models,…
The advantage of learning a new language is it sometimes makes you re-think the old languages you know. For example, here is a problem that happens often: Some people are morons. For example, say I were to ask you the following question: “How old are you?” YOU would probably answer something like, 42 or 21….
So I say, “There may be some useful information in the text fields. For example, people who use credit to buy commodities, such as meat may differ from people who buy finished goods like clothing who may differ from people who purchase machinery on credit. Perhaps you may want to consider some kind of clustering.”…
In the past, when I had to do any type of parsing of text, I wrote my own code with a zillion SUBSTR functions and IF statements and it did the job but it was *so-o-o ugly and painful that I never even considered including text mining in any courses I taught. I looked into…
I had a bit of difficulty remembering the exact way push and pop functions in JavaScript work until I thought of the PEZ dispenser. When you have an array that you create like this: var bob = [1,47] ; and you do this: bob.push(9,12) now your new array is [1,47,9,12] In other words, push…
Two years ago, I said that data visualization was the next big thing. I also said that people would stick with SAS because it was easier to use and there are more people who DON’T want to be programmers than do. Fast forward to 2012 and Visual Analytics is all over the place. SAS On-Demand,…