SAS is the Devil

I've spent 10 hours over the last two days debugging a SAS program I wrote about 2 months ago. It was written for a paper that's coming along nicely, but I haven't revisited the data (or the program) for a while.

Unfortunately, I didn't document the program very well.

I thought, "well, all I have to do is run this one test. That shouldn't take long."

Cue Jaws theme song and commence profanity
...

/profanity

When will I learn?

Now that I've gotten down to a part of the program that has to run for a while (merging two VERY large (> 50 gig) datasets), I can take a break.

update: It finally finished running. It "only" took 14 hours (yes, that's right, 14 hours). And that's after having used every trick I knew to make it more efficient.

Memorial Day

It's Memorial Day - time to remember and honor all those who fought to preserve our way of life.

As I've done in previous years, here's a link to Ronald Reagan's classic "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech, given in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of D-Day (compliments of American Rhetoric).

After that, go see this PowerPoint file sent to me by Bob Jensen. If you don't have Powerpoint click here to view it without music. If you do have it, download the file here (both stored on DocStoc).

Now it's off the the movies, followed by charring some animal flesh on the grille.

Googlenomics, Auction Theory, and Hal Varian

Like many programs, the Unknown Alma Mater's doctoral program used Varian's Economics text for our Micro Sequence. So, I perk up when I hear Varian's name mentioned.

It turns out he's Google's Chief Economist (who knew - Google has a chief economist?). A recent Steven Levy piece in Wired magazine talks about the ways the company uses economic theory (and auction theory in specific) in their Google AdWords program. Here are a couple of snippets:

At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men. But Varian saw immediately that Google's ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. "The theory was Google as yenta—matchmaker," he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or students to dorm rooms. It was called a two-sided matching market. "The mathematical structure of the Google auction," Varian says, "is the same as those two-sided matching markets."

Varian tried to understand the process better by applying game theory. "I think I was the first person to do that," he says. After just a few weeks at Google, he went back to Schmidt. "It's amazing!" Varian said. "You've managed to design an auction perfectly."

...

AdWords was such a hit that Google went auction-crazy. The company used auctions to place ads on other Web sites (that program was dubbed AdSense). "But the really gutsy move," Varian says, "was using it in the IPO." In 2004, Google used a variation of a Dutch auction for its IPO; Brin and Page loved that the process leveled the playing field between small investors and powerful brokerage houses. And in 2008, the company couldn't resist participating in the FCC's auction to reallocate portions of the radio spectrum.

Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."

Read the whole thing here.

HELP!

I also run a blog for Unknown University's Finance department. Unfortunately, I seem to have inadvertantly changed a setting on the blog (either that, or I've got some kind of virus).

I was just trying to post something on the blog, and when I typed anything in, it immediately transformed into different characters. For example, if I typed in

ABC

It displayed as

एबीसी

Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it?

update: yes, I am an idiot. Somehow, I had enabled the "tranliterate into Hindi option" in the settings.

Interesting Times In The Unknown Household

For a number of reasons, I haven't been blogging much:

• First off, I'm still in post-semester recovery mode. This happens every Spring - after the semester is over, I need a week or two to decompress, clean out the detritus of the year from my office, and kick back a bit before refocusing on my summer research goals. This time around, between the timing of exams and faculty meetings, it was worse than usual.
  
• Second, we've catching up on some "family time". We offloaded the Unknown Baby Boy (UBB) to the Unknown Sister-in-Law and took the kids to Six Flags in Lake George for a couple of days. Unknown Son is currently into a minor Looney Tunes obsession, and they have an entire section of the park with an LT theme. Without UBB, we got to focus on the older two kids, and we even got a couple of good nights' sleep.
  
• We're also cleaning up the Unknown House. Because of all the craziness we've had this spring, we're doing Spring Cleaning this time around in June.
• Meanwhile, we've been arranging some pretty cool stuff for the kids. There's an organization called Famous Fone Friends that works with sick children. They've arranged to set up a meeting between Unknown Son and the author of one of his favorite book series (he lives about 80 minutes from us, and agreed to meet Unknown Son for lunch at a nearby restaurant for lunch). In addition, U.S. will be getting a phone call from Sam on iCarly. The organization also sent Unknown Daughter an actual script from the Hannah Montana show (her favorite), so she's also pretty excited.
  

On an unrelated note, we just got some potentially disturbing news regarding the Unknown Son. A recent CT scan showed a couple of irregularities in his lungs. We'll be doing a biopsy next week so we'll be keeping our fingers crossed.

Next week continues the crazy pace. We travel to my sister's house for Memorial Day, have a meeting with the Stem Cell Transplant unit at Children's Hospital of Boston on Tuesday (if the irregularity mentioned above turns out to be nothing, this will be the next step in his treatment), and have a biopsy to check out the irregularity in U.S.'s scan scheduled on Wednesday. So, regular blogging might resume by the end of next week.

That is, if my head doesn't explode before then...

Grading - The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Sometimes I think I'm in a Godfather movie (i.e. "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in").

Actually, it's my own fault. Last week, I had a touch schedule: lack of sleep, doing executive education, an all-day faculty meeting, and only 48 hours between my final exam and when grades had to be posted. With all that, I somehow managed to get it all done.

Or maybe not.

Turns out I made an error in my grading spreadsheet. Not surprising, since I use the excel functions quite a bit in grading - I pick the highest "n out of k" quizzes, weight the exams differently based on whether then grade on the final is better than on one or more of the earlier exams, and have a few other curves built in.

As a result, I usually spend a LOT of time debugging the spreadsheet before assigning final grades. But not this time.

So now I have to file about a half-dozen grade change forms.

Grading - the gift that keeps on giving.

With a bit of luck, I should be able to get back to productive stuff by this afternoon.

update: regrading is done - only a few grades actually needed to be changed. Now, back to research!.

Q&A With Myron Scholes

Here's a short "Crash Course" interview with Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes, conducted by Deborah Solomon.

The guy's got a sense of humor. Who'da thunk it?

Stick A Fork In Me!

The semester is now officially over at Unknown University. I gave my last final Tuesday afternoon (the last slot in finals week). Unfortunately, grades had to be turned in by 4 today (only 48 hours later).

I finished the almost all the grading last night at 3 a.m. (except for the final assigning of grades). So, it looked like the coast was clear.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever easy in the Unknown Household.

This morning, Unknown Elder Son was looking and feeling washed out. So, after a quick trip to the local hospital to have his blood counts taken, it turns out he needed a blood transfusion (not an uncommon thing - anemia is a common side effect of chemo).

Unknown Wife took him in for the transfusion, and I got to attend the faculty meeting with the Unknown Baby in tow (he slept through the entire morning, which is probably the best course of action when on a faculty retreat). After lunch, I left to feed him and drop him off at a neighbor's house for the afternoon, so I could finish the grading.

Now it's off to Six Flags for the weekend. Since the Unknown Sister-In-Law is taking care of the little one for the weekend, it'll be almost like we're a family of four again.

Happy Mother's Day

We're off to a neighboring state to visit my mother for Mother's day. It'll be the first time my side of the family gets to see the Unknown Baby Boy in person.

As for the rest of my life, I have a final exam to write for Tuesday, followed by an executive education class on Wednesday, a Faculty retreat on Thursday, and a trip to Six Flags in Lake George over the weekend (Unknown Older Son is a big Loony Tunes fan, and we wanted to go there before his stem cell transplant in early June).

So, blogging will continue to be light for the next week or so.

Now go tell your Mother (or the mother of your children) how much you appreciate her.

A Good Conference, Followed By More Crazy

I thought I'd put a few impressions of the EFA conference from this past week. While pretty short, it was a very good time: catching up with old friends, making some new ones, getting a lot of work done, and SLEEEEEP!

Because of all the other stuff going on in the Unknown Household, I was only able to get away for a day, so I took an early Friday flight to Baltimore, followed by the train to Washington. I arrived at the conference hotel just before lunch. Between 11:00 Friday and 1:30 Saturday (when I took the hotel shuttle to the airport for my return flight) I

• Had two papers presented (both were presented by coauthors), and received good comments on both. In both cases, the papers were well received by the discussant and the audience.
  
• Met with coauthors on three papers (the two mentioned above and a third one that's also coming along nicely). On two of the papers, we just talked briefly to discuss what needs to be done next to get them out the door. On the third paper, my coauthor and I spent about a hour applying various methods of statistical torture to the data, yielding some pretty nice confessions (oops! - that would be "results").
• Arranged to present a paper at my undergraduate Alma mater in the fall. I know a good number of the faculty, none of which were there back in the dark ages when I was an undergrad. We've been talking about my coming to present some of my work for some time, and it looks like it'll finally happen
• Talked with another potential coauthor about combining some of my data with his methodology.
• Most importantly, I went to bed by 9:30 and (since there was no-one clamoring for a 3 a.m. feeding) slept almost 9 1/2 hours without interruption. Woo Hoo!
  

Just to show that nothing ever changes for long, when I got back, I called the Unknown Wife, and she said it was all right to go to a book store and veg a bit (it's one of my favorite ways to decompress).

Of course, this was followed by a second phone call an hour later telling me that Unknown Son was getting nosebleeds. We called the on-call oncologist and was informed that he was likely low on platelets (they are the clotting factor in the blood, and often get depressed following chemotherapy). So, it was a quick drive home, followed by a trip to the ER, followed by an overnight stay at the hospital so he could get a platelet transfusion (since it was the weekend, we couldn't do it on an outpatient basis.).

He was discharged the next morning, and all's been quiet since.

For now.