Last week, teaching my statistics class, I gave an example of regression using actual data. I had hypothesized that given the greater discrimination and poverty on the reservation 40 or 50 years ago, there would be a negative relationship between age and educational attainment within the adult population. That is, people over 60 would be…
I decided about a year ago that it was time to write an educational game to teach math. None of the languages I knew were an optimal choice for this. I’d been programming in SAS for 30 years and it’s an excellent choice for processing the data that come in from pre-tests, student answers and…
We shipped. Again. It was not everything I wanted to go into version 1.1 but we had four days to get it installed on all of the computers being used at our test site and one of those days was being taken by FedEx to get our flash drive to North Dakota and the other…
What do you see when you look at a regression analysis? Because me, all I see is a bunch of numbers and I have no idea where to look first or what’s important. Could you start me off with regression in some baby steps? What is it that you are looking at when you stare…
While about equal percentages of the general public will be either happy or upset with the outcome of the presidential and congressional elections, 100% of statisticians will be cheering Nate Silver. The reason I’ve watched Silver’s blog very closely is because I’m a big believer in the Central Limit Theorem, which states that the mean…
Not a day goes by that I don’t read an article saying I don’t exist. Apparently, there are no women actually running start-ups, no Latinos in technology. No one outside of Silicon Valley is doing anything. Maybe I’m a unicorn. Or perhaps I’m invisible. If I were to actually exist, and if it was possible…
Today, I wanted to find the confidence interval for the difference between two proportions. I have SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Excel and God knows what else laying around. I did not want to go to the effort of plugging the numbers into a calculator, but it really is a pretty straightforward formula, so you would…
Yesterday and the day before, I gave an example of using SAS to sort student responses into the class they were in using the DATEPART function, TIMEPART function and a few DO-loops. After making sure my code runs, I decided it was pretty redundant and thus a classic case for a macro. What I want…
Any time you find yourself writing the same code over and over, you should be either thinking of a DO loop or a macro. Here is an example that jumped out at me yesterday. The problem was this: Every time a student answers a question in our game, it is stored in our database. After…
While I believe SAS Enterprise Guide was developed to make statistical analysis easier for non-programmers, it is also a useful tool for experienced programmers. Often, I find myself thinking, “I KNOW there is a function that does that ….” but I just can’t remember exactly what it is. Take today as an example. I have…