In my misspent youth, I was the first American to win the world judo championships. This came about since I had a propensity to run my mouth off, which often led to fights. Those people who said I better be able to “walk the walk if I was going to talk the talk”. Well, I…
People who are following the reverb10 blogs would no doubt be disappointed by today’s post because it has absolutely nothing to do with finding my compass in life, unless life’s compass is possibly nested in a SAS macro. Since I started this blog to write down things I was sure I would want to remember…
On the front page of the Los Angeles Times today was a story about three of the middle schools in Los Angeles serving the highest proportion of students in poverty. My daughter, “The Perfect Jennifer”, did her student teaching at one of the three and teaches at a second. She said to me today, Mom,…
The #reverb10 prompt for December 3rd was to write about a time when you felt most truly alive in 2010. There were more prompts, about what you wonder about and other examining-your-soul type of introspection. This isn’t that kind of blog. I don’t think I’m that type of person. For the record, the time I…
As my lovely oldest daughter, noted, most of what most people turn out to be, for better or for worse, they owe to their mothers. Family legend has it that my mother, a former Catholic nun, former second grade teacher, was bored sitting home in Karachi, West Pakistan while my father worked on the Air…
The reverb10 prompt for today was to sum up 2010 in one word. It reminded me of a kid I used to play with. Her name was Star, her sister’s name was Secret and her brother’s name was Arrow. She said that, after each birth, her mom opened the dictionary at random and whatever word…
I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal on SAS software and CEO Jim Goodnight said, “We’re producing so many new products. [They’re all] in the funnel and we’ve got to get them in production and it’s taking us longer to get them out the door…. A lot of the problems are testing…
I went to the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference a couple of weeks ago. One of the great benefits of this conference, more than most others, is the extent to which you see new people discussing new ideas. What WUSS is not For both statistical software and academics, I have found a diminishing…
Hello, world – It’s me, on my soapbox again. The latest straw was a discussion of articles in Science which have been the subject of retraction or “expression of concern”. According to Retraction Watch there are between 30 and 95 retractions each year. The ones you hear about are usually in medicine and the “hard”…
Unstructured data is to the usual database as Toontown is to Irvine Ranch (or Diamond Bar or Porter Ranch or any other white bread community that has two names, six types of floor plans and where half the children are named Buffy, Jessica, Jason or Justin – you know who you are). If one were…