The Rocket Scientist is opposed to buying software that has licenses activated, on general principle and because we usually have at least six computers between the two of us – a desktop Mac each which are our two main computers, a laptop each for travel, a Windows machine or two for testing. Then there is…
Having failed recently to use BMI as a variable from a data set on school children in our example for propensity score matching, because people who fill out surveys are big, fat liars, we next went to a sample of really old people and used death as a dependent variable Try faking it on the…
I’m taking off for two weeks on a working vacation defined as I will be working while the rest of the family is on vacation. I found it interesting that the list of what I NEEDED to do in getting ready was Go to the Apple store and pick up a 500 GB hard drive….
We are looking for data to use as an example of propensity score matching for a couple of upcoming workshop / classes. Since the data I have used previously belonged to other people, I needed to come up with an example that could be stated in a format something like: Controlling for X, Y and…
Oddly, Sandra Scarr, author of both the seminal study on IQs of black children adopted into white homes and the book on child care, “Mother care/other care” gave this advice to working mothers. I quoted her years ago in a chapter I wrote for a book used in Freshman 101 courses. The title (of the…
Years ago, I happened to be at a meeting where two well-known African-American researchers were speaking. Like many conferences, there were “round table” luncheons with the famous people that you could attend. I forgot what the topic was supposed to be, but there were a couple of young African-American women at the table and somehow…
When I send bills to clients, I often, both for their information and mine, include the initials for the staff members being charged to that project. Of course, people are charged at different rates and this helps us internally keep track of who is being charged to what project and also allows us to easily…
I learned at St. Mary’s Catholic School that envy was a sin. Good thing I am going to mass on Thursday, because I am suffering from a good deal of envy lately. First there is blog envy. If you have not checked out The Berkeley Blog, I highly recommend it, starting with this post on…
I thought it would be really interesting today to get back to looking at SAS Enterprise Miner, especially the text mining. I thought it would be cool to take another look at Statistica. I also thought it would be cool to finish a blog post I started on power analysis for mixed models. And I…
I decided I need to learn a new language. I had learned a number of languages in the past but SAS is the only one I used on a daily basis. I write SPSS syntax about every other day (does that count?). I toyed with Ruby and C++. I listened, bemusedly, to people who exhorted…