I have a meeting scheduled for Washington, D.C. that includes federal employees and government contractors. Many of these people are not working now and the building where it is supposed to take place is closed. I had to decide whether or not to buy my plane ticket today and take advantage of the three-week advance…
There has been far more heat than light surrounding the current controversy over whether a transgender (male to female) fighter should be allowed to compete in mixed martial arts in the women’s division. This article on The Verge said that opponents of Ms. Fox competition “are not supported by the current science”, citing the fact…
“I’m XX years old and I’ve never used (insert any statistical technique here). Why do I need to know this?” I’ve heard some version of the above on every topic from linear regression to structural equation models, and at every age from teenagers to executives in their sixties. I’ve even made comments like that myself….
I’m in North Carolina this week at a class for professors on Advanced Predictive Modeling using SAS Enterprise Miner. This is the sort of statement that causes The Spoiled One & Co. to make faces that look like this: Despite my failure to impress fourteen-year-olds, I think the class has been well worth it. I’m…
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’d always found the SPSS help pretty basic, so I don’t even consider it when looking for information. However, courtesy of the UCLA Academic Computing Group, which has a bunch of the SPSS case studies on-line, I found this one on mixed models. It really is one of the most straight-forward explanations of mixed models,…
No, this is not a post about politics or life-hacking, although the same title could apply in either case. I am talking about statistical power. People often ask me what the power of a test is, but the problem is that they are asking the wrong question. Power is not a single number. I understand…
Being sick with only half of my brain cells functioning, I spent the weekend reading random articles on some of my favorite sites. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find one had the stock title: “Do you want to start your own business, escaping the cubicle, be the next Mark Zuckerberg, do you have…
This is part 3 (hence the name) of my posts on how to learn advanced SAS from other people’s code. Yes, taking a class is a good idea – I have taken several – a couple from SAS Institute here and there, several before or after conferences like WUSS and SAS Global Forum. For me,…
When I met my second husband, the entire contents of his kitchen cupboards was a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a loaded Magnum revolver. Despite that, he was extremely healthy. His reasoning was that he was a big, tough guy while viruses and bacteria were little bitty things, so…