The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first 

sharpen his tools.

 --Confucian Analects. BOOK XV.WEI LING KUNG.CHAP.IX.

My paper Work Smarter than Harder-tools for growing up a SAS programmer was accepted by SAS Global Forum 2011. It would be my first time to attend SAS user group conference worldwide. The draft version is available at

http://jiangtanghu.com/docs/en/SGF2011_JiangtangHU(draft).pdf

Welcome for any comments.

The SGF2011 will be held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. The interesting thing is that, as far as I know, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was also the host for SUGI 1978(Jan 30-Feb 1, 1978). looking forward to seeing my SAS gurus in Caesars Palace next year, a place of history.

End year Haiku again!

Yesterday I finished my project, wrote a Haiku to colleagues worldwide to say happy new year, then closed my desktop, said goodbye to colleagues still in office:

In December my baby born

my project deliveries followed on

Now my computers shutdown

do until(6 Jan 2011) I will be OOO

Please take blessings from John

Happy New Year!

Almost at the same time, there are two SAS blogs aggregators popping up to the web for SAS programmers worldwide, one in Chinese, the other, English:

http://saslist.com/  in Chinese, maintained by sxlion, also the owner of a SAS information site,  http://saslist.net/

http://sas-x.com/   in English, maintained by Tal Galili, also the owner of R blogs aggregator, http://r-bloggers.com/

I try to express in a very symmetrical way. What’s more (and interesting), these two aggregators share a same WordPress template. My blogs, in Chinese and in English, are also the members of these aggregators respectively.

I view this is the first wave for SAS programmers to embrace the Web2.0 world. If interested, you could also add your SAS blogs in

http://sas-x.com/add-your-blog/

To understand recursion, one of the most important concepts in programming languages, you could watch the movie, Chris Nolan’s Inception: it is about a dream within a dream within a dream, …and, read two statistical papers by Professor Robert Newcombe, one of the most prolific statisticians:

• Two-sided confidence intervals for the single proportion: comparison of seven methods.
  Newcombe RG, Stat Med , Volume 17 , 8 (April 1998) pp.857-872
• Interval estimation for the difference between independent proportions: comparison of eleven methods.
  Newcombe RG, Stat Med , Volume 17 , 8 (April 1998) pp.873-890

These two widely cited papers evaluate 7 and 11 methods to calculate single proportion (paper A) and the difference between proportions (paper B), respectively. Further more, they were in the same issue of Statistics in Medicine(Volume 17, 1998), and, they were also cross referenced! So here is a live story about recursive referencing(thanks to Prof. Newcombe):

• An author writes two papers, A and B;
• Paper B is in the  bibliographic reference session of paper A;
• Paper A is also in the  bibliographic reference session of paper B;
• Paper A and paper B are in the same issue of a journal.

Note that for Prof. Newcombe’s two linked papers, it is common and acceptable in publication practices. Recently I used these two wonderful papers to learn CI calculation and this post just want to lead to the concept of “recursion”  (reference in reference in reference).

Peter Petocz and Anna Reid(2010) grouped three levels of students’ conceptions of statistics:

• Level I:   focus on techniques
• Level II:  focus on using data
• Level III: focus on meaning

I found the three conceptions could be easily interpreted as the three kinds of state of learning and using statistics based on my personal experience:

• State I: focus on techniques—As a student of Economics and (then) Software Engineering, I needed some statistics techniques to support my study on data mining and machine learning. So I invested a lot on some fancy skills such as logistic regression, decision tree,  neural network and even support vector machine in graduate school and SAS R&D(as an intern). In most time, I just thrown data to the models and checked their functionality and feasibility(Wula-IT-WORKS! or Oops-crash-again). When looking back, I’d just have to say these techniques were toys played in labs.
• State II:  focus on using data—Now I worked as a SAS programmer(also titled as statistical analyst) in pharma. All data are not just the rows and columns in the tables. They are SUBJECTS! Statistical techniques are used carefully to display and interpret the story of real world. Why the denominator is 999 while 1000 subjects were recruited in this trial? Because subject 001-127, male, 23 months of age,  discontinued due to his father’s wish and opinion!
• State III: focus on meaning—Peter Petocz and Anna Reid concluded that, regarding the MEANING conception of statistics, “statistics is an inclusive tool used to make sense of the world and develop personal meanings.” The last state of any realms ideal, is always sounded like philosophy or religion. That may be a life in a statistical way or style(If got it, I would change my blog’s title as From a Statistical Point of View^).

—————-some notes on non-statistics—————————-

1. three kinds of state of Chan

• just mountain
• isn’t mountain
• still mountain

2. three realm ideal of Wang Guowei

• heaven is integrated with man:

Last night the west wind shriveled the green-clad trees,

Alone I climb the high tower

To gaze my fill along the road to the horizon.

• knowledge is integrated with practice

My clothes grow daily more loose, yet care I not.

For you am I thus wasting away in sorrow and pain.

• feeling is integrated with scenery

I sought her in the crowd a hundred, a thousand times.

Suddenly with a turn of the head [I saw her],

That one there where the lamplight was fading.

Reference:

Peter Petocz and Anna Reid. On Becoming a Statistician—A Qualitative View. International Statistical Review(2010), 78,2,271

WANG Guowei. Ren jian ci hua. translated by Adele Austin Rickett.

This blog, “From A Logical Point of View”, is not supposed to be owned by a logician. Actually, the book, From A Logical Point of View, is a collection of logical and philosophical essays by W.V.Quine(1908-2000), an American philosopher and mathematician.

A story about this book. From A Logical Point of View, was a calypso song by Robert Mitchum, an US actor, composer and singer. Quine enjoyed this music and used it as his new book, which is Quine’s best seller. Now I love this book and give the name to my blog from a logical point of view^.

First prompts are silent.
Subsequent prompts loud and clear.
Now all prompts are heard.

Poem from R&D staff?
Yes. Rhyming sonnets were shakespeare-like complex;
they wrote Japanese haiku, showed as above.

The SAS R&D staff should complete some paper work in defects system before changing a code. They use informal descriptive language(HAIKUUU!) in the early stage. Chris Hemedinger, a senior software engineer at SAS, collected some haikus in his blog to show the humor side of SAS R&D staff. It’s interesting to cite one of the most famous haikus by Matsuo Bashō for comparison:

Old pond
a frog jumps
the sound of water