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…
On my way home from the 2014 Western Users of SAS Software conference. When I was younger, I would go to every basic session trying to find something I could use that wasn’t over my head. As I got older, I went to the statistics sessions to see if there was anything new or more…
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…
I’m upset that I’m not perfect and I’m also very tired. The Invisible Developer asked me tonight if I had a list of all of the grants that I’d had funded in my career. For some reason, he thought I should have kept track of that. I told him that no one cared, not even…
Last week was very productively spent at Unite 2014 learning about all things Unity. In case you are not into game development, Unity claims to be used by over a million game developers around the world. While I rather suspect those statistics are up their with Second Life and Twitter counting everyone who ever signed up…
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…
Hint: It’s math! My last post, I ranted about the need for math if you are going to learn to code. I was thinking about that again today. Unity is the game engine that claims to be used by over a million developers. That may be true – it seems like everyone I ran into…