I stole that name from Chris Hemedinger for “The Missing Manual” because I thought it was hilarious. If you don’t program in SAS much then you probably did not think immediately, “Oh, . is the symbol for missing numeric data, how funny.” In fact, you are probably more like my daughter, Maria Burns Ortiz, who…
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.” It sounds as if Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the…
I have long suspected that the main role of other people on this earth is to annoy me. Take FIPS codes. FIPS stands for “Federal Information Processing Standard”. Does no one know the meaning of the word “standard” ? A FIPS code is a useful thing. For counties it is a FIVE digit code. Got…
Someone sent me a video on self-defense a while back showing the various ways people respond when threatened. It noted that we automatically think of ‘weapon-like’ objects for self-defense. We may not actually have a knife or club but we grab a letter-opener, baseball bat or broomstick. The sender noted that other objects can be…
So you want to install SAS for Linux…. Step 1: Read the documentation for some hints on how to download and install the download manager, and the SAS software depot (if you are the SAS administrator). Step 2 : Throw away the documentation. It will just confuse you after this point and it doesn’t help anyway….
The NIH stimulus grants were supposed to be announced in August. Many people I know have already been turned down, no surprise since there were 10,000 applications for 200 grants. I checked on grants.gov last night and our proposal has been assigned a panel with a review date of 10/2009 which is very weird since…
“Is there anything you can do to help? I’d kill you but there is a law against it. You’d better leave before I figure out a way around that.” This comment was made by a co-worker of mine who had saved all of the data for his thesis for a masters in computer science on…
At the JMP seminar on Monday, when Dick De Veaux said that 65-70% of time in all research projects is spent on data cleaning, everyone in the audience groaned in agreement. One of the biggest problems I run into is recoding those simple textboxes. For example, we often want to look at data for one…
FINALLY got a few minutes to download the latest version. For some reason the download I received was for the planned installation as opposed to the basic installation. In 25 words or less, basic installation is for stand-alone installs on a single machine, which we have hundreds of users doing. The planned installation would be…
All right, well maybe they are not that secret, but there are some really great resources out there that you may want to check out. If you didn’t get to the SPSS Higher Education Road Show at UCLA because rush hour in Los Angeles is from 7-9, 4-6 and any time you are on the…