Getting ready to teach a data mining course at the end of the year, I started looking through data sets I have on my desktop. Not sure what I will end up using. My first lesson, no matter what, is going to be on data quality. The very first thing I did was a series…
I can imagine the type of person served by an expensive, intensive programming bootcamp – someone with money (or, at least, good credit) and several weeks of free time. That has never described me in my life. The last time I had six weeks free was in the summer after tenth grade, before I started…
Tom Peters has written quite a bit about the huge market opportunities in providing goods and services designed for two populations – women and old geezers. I thought of this today as, for the thousandth time, I went through the pre-check line only to have my titanium knee set off the security alarm and get…
For the past 24 years, I have been someone’s boss – research assistants, secretaries, programmers, tech writers, artists, animators – the list is long, of both people and positions. When I told my niece the title of this post, she asked, “Wouldn’t your boss just tell you (whatever it was)? Isn’t that the good thing…
I read some poorly done research the other day that showed a very small number of start-ups that became billion-dollar companies were started by people over 50. As someone else pointed out in the comments to it, that was lacking a key number, the denominator. That is, if people over 50 only started 20 companies,…
Since there is a blizzard and I’m inside analyzing data, I thought it was a good time for another random SAS tip. The default output type for SAS 9.4 is HTML, which is nice for presentation and sharing, but sometimes I would like a plain text output, especially if I’m going to be doing…
So, this is day 13 of the 20 day blogging challenge, and I skipped over day 12 (although I may go back to it). The prompt was “Tell about a favorite book to share or teach. Provide at least one example of an extension or cross-curricular lesson.” My favorite resource is not actually a book,…
Sometimes, like Alice in Wonderland, I give myself very good advice. Unlike Alice, though, I occasionally take it. The very best advice I think I have given on this blog is this: Always do one more thing. Before you turn in at the end of the day, when you think you are tired out and…
Lately, I’ve been a terrible person. I have told many people, “No, I cannot help you.” After six happily profitable years, we’re winding down The Julia Group consulting division. We are not taking any new contracts and not adding on to any existing contracts. As contracts expire, we are not replacing them with new business….
This week I had one of those pain-in-the-ass problems. I had a test with 24 items but they were of mixed types. That is, for some the answer was multiple choice and for others it was numbers. The data was received as an Excel file. Now, I could have opened it with SAS Enterprise Guide…