Messing with SASquatch

For those of you unfamiliar with the beef jerky commercials, I've included a couple embedded videos. The basic direction of these ads is that people get up the courage to do something which seems stupid to normal people and then get payback from the beast similar to Bigfoot that they are trying to do these things too. (As a side note, Bigfoot's apparently dead).





Now for the greater amount of you who don't know, SAS is a computer program that I am beginning to become acquaintances with. An acronym for Statistical Analysis Software (or something similar), it is a huge program that over the years has evolved from just simple statistical work to a broad data management system. It pretty much dictates the value of your research to the world. An amazing little bit of trivia, but here as students at a contributing university to the SAS project in the beginning, we still get it for dirt cheap rather than the thousands that corporations pay for it.

So in an effort to understand this significant program which will be vital to any scientific acceptance of my labor in graduate school, I've started taking a class to try and learn how to speak the language. And I'm not making that up, we're really learning to speak a new language by learning how to type in programs and commands. SAS takes commands in its own type of sentences, phrases and word codings and a puzzle piece to using it correctly is speaking that language. If only there were a Rosetta Stone for it.

I don't know how many of my readers recall anything about typing in programs or commands, but before the days of what we have now and clicking to get what we want like lab rats in a light bulb experiment, we used to have to type in the commands we wanted just to get the games we wanted to play. Letters on the keyboard meant commands in the games and we were pretty happy with all of that. Well, it's kinda like that experience all over again and from that standpoint, I really enjoy being able to type in commands again and see the result on the output as if I really knew what was going on in the computer program's "mind". What I don't enjoy is that every time I start messing with SAS it turns around and slaps me in the face.

Example. Our professor encourages groups to do homework together so I make a pilgrimage to the other Animal Science grad office every day or two to discuss their homework. As part of our homework we have to submit the coding that we used to get the answers. While I've noticed that everyone else submits their proposed codes, I'm one of the only that submits my actual output from running the codes. And it lists the days total lines from the work alongside the code in output. Of course, nothing goes very smoothly and my professor thought it was pretty funny to see that on the very first homework I went through nearly 1000 lines of coding for only 8 problems! That's how many errors I had.

And then there's the simple fact that sometimes it just doesn't work. I get a little ambitious and try to punch in a few of the extras or label my graphics and all the sudden my functional programming went hormonal up the wazoo and I get a baker's dozen of error messages written in a language that might as well be Swahili to me. And even the online help software doesn't help that much since most of is for the cheap method of data analysis with button clicks, etc., rather than just punching in code like I'm doing. I often am reminded as I type code of the old "punctuation substitution" concept born a few years back.

So I have to do it in little bits at a time. It takes me about 45 minutes to get burned out on it and I juggle in and out of the homework all the time. If you haven't noticed, my blog posts have risen dramatically since Spring break ended and I started up with this class and its related homework. Just a little peek into my day at the desk.