Any time I hear someone brag, “I’ve never used X in my life,” I automatically assume that whatever it is, they haven’t learned it very well. Just about everything I’ve learned has come in useful, and the better I learned it, the more useful it is. Take statistics, for example. There is nowhere in my…
There is not nearly enough replication in scientific research. It’s unfortunate that funding agencies and academic journals always want to see a new twist – a different technique, a different population. Personally, I’m very interested in reading studies that say: “I did the exact same study as Mary Lou Who and I found pretty much…
I’m giving a talk on Preparing Students for the Real World of Data at SAS Global Forum next month. You’d think 50 minutes would be long enough for me to talk, but that just goes to show you don’t know me as well as you think you do. One point made in the template for…
If you came into my office and watched me work today, just before I had you arrested for stalking me, you might notice me doing some things that are the absolute opposite of best practices. I need about 10 datasets for some analyses I’ll be doing for my SAS Global Forum paper. I also want…
We were driving to the hospital to get some tests done and complaining about the traffic with Colorado Ave. closed for a couple of blocks for construction on the new train line. The Invisible Developer, brilliant, as usual, commented, At least we have the luxury of worrying about every day things. He was right, of…
As further proof that God has a sense of humor, my career has been full of reversals. Where I was once the pain-in-the-ass young hotshot who knew everything and thought my boss was stuck in the past century, now I have to deal with people like that. For my first few years as an employee,…
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…
It has been a while since I wrote on this topic, which, as I explained initially, was going to be a blog category called “Mama AnnMaria’s Advice on Not Getting Your Ass Fired” but it turned out out that doesn’t fit in the sidebar. It was suggested to me this week by a couple of…
Physicians say that once a patient hears the word “cancer”, their brain shuts down and they don’t hear anything else. To be fair to the patients, understanding survival statistics isn’t always simple. Let’s take just one example: The three-year survival rate is different from the third-year survival rate. If you have been told that the…