Monthly Archives: March 2018

PMean: Exporting a graph in SAS

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I got a question about how to export a graph in SAS to a program like PowerPoint. There are several ways to do this, and I explained that you can right click on any graph that appears on your screen and copy it to the clipboard and then open up PowerPoint and right click on a slide and paste it in. That’s fairly standard on any Windows system. I presume that SAS supports similar approaches on the Macintosh and Linus, but I have no easy way of testing this.

But there are other ways to export a graph. You can tell SAS to save a particular graph to a file and then you can import that file into PowerPoint. It works, but there is a twist. Continue reading →

Recommended: Getting Started with the SAS 9.4 Output Delivery System

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I don’t use SAS that much anymore. Not because it’s a bad program. Mostly it’s because it’s hard to keep on top of too many statistical packages all at once. But I’m teaching an Introduction to SAS class this semester, and I need to keep up with recent innovations. One of the more important of these is ODS, which is short for Output Delivery System. ODS allows you to customize the output using formats like HTML, RTF, PDF, or PostScript. ODS also produces PowerPoint and Excel files.

ODS also allows you to customize how your output appears. Finally, ODS makes some big changes to procedures that used to only produce printed output. With ODS enabled, these procedures will add in extra high resolution plots, which you can also customize.

I do not know if the Introduction to SAS class should incorporate ODS or not. It’s similar to asking if the Introduction to R class should incorporate markdown documents or not. In general, I tend to think that we should teach plain vanilla versions of SAS and R, but I do worry that we may be missing something important if we don’t teach ODS or markdown. Continue reading →

PMean: Tests of equivalence and non-inferiority

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I’m making a webinar presentation in April for The Analysis Factor. I’ve done this several times in the past. The talk in April will be on tests of equivalence and non-inferiority, a topic which I have covered briefly in my newsletter. I thought I’d share a first draft of the abstract here on my blog. Continue reading →

PMean: Peer grading in Introduction to R, SPSS, SAS

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I’ve gotten some helpful feedback that I need to encourage more interactions among students in the on-line classes, Introduction to R, Introduction to SPSS, and Introduction to SAS. No just interactions of the students with the teacher, but interactions between the students.

In many online classes this is done by encouraging online discussion of the material in the class. This is not so easy, however, for these three classes. I can just imagine myself posting the following on Blackboard. “Tell me what you think about the read.csv function in R.”

There are a couple of ways, however, that make sense for technical classes like these. Continue reading →

PMean: Changes to the Introduction to R, SAS, and SPSS classes

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I have helped develop and have taught (along with other faculty in our department) three one credit hour pass/fail classes: Introduction to R, Introduction to SPSS, and Introduction to SAS. These classes were developed back in 2014-2015 and they are in need of some serious updates. I will try to outline some of the updates that I think these classes need in this blog post. Continue reading →

Recommended: Is vaccine effectiveness (VE) different from vaccine efficacy

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This is a non-technical discussion of the difference between effectiveness and efficacy (two easily confused terms) in the context of vaccination. Short answer: efficacy is a measurement under ideal circumstances while effectiveness is a measurement in a “real-world” setting. Continue reading →