I’m not normally a fan of graffiti. But I have been quite taken with one particular instance of graffiti that appeared in my neighborhood a few months ago. Here it is:
I don’t know who wrote this, but I like their way of taking something ordinary and injecting it simultaneously with humor and profundity.
For a while now you might say that I have been yielding to traffic in the Circle of Life. But the traffic seems to be thinning out these days, and I have a backlog of half-written posts. With a little luck, I hope to be moving along in the Circle of Life and have more to say in the future.
As a SAS programmer, the idea of Big Data is nothing new to me. Decades have passed since I first wrestled with the special challenges of making sense out of huge data sets. Some things have changed, of course. A million records doesn’t seem as remarkable now as it did 20 years ago, but the basic principles involved are still the same; we just have a lot more computing power at our command now. So it’s interesting to me to see that the idea of Big Data has finally–even suddenly–hit the mainstream.
I don’t agree with every claim this journalist makes. (Math and Statistics are not the only routes to success in data analysis. What you need is a logical mind and you’re just as likely to find that in someone majoring in Home Ec or Art as in Math and Stats.) And no discussion of Big Data is complete without mention of the fact that SAS Institute practically invented the field. Despite those shortcomings, the fact that Big Data has attracted this much attention is good news for SAS programmers everywhere.
During the few weeks when my father was sick, I discovered an instrumental version of Aaron Copland’s “The Tender Land Suite” and fell in love with one particular movement, playing it over and over and over….
I just learned that “The Tender Land” is an opera with libretto by Horace Everett—and the movement I fell in love with is named “The Promise of Living.” The story is about a family living on a farm in the Midwest during the Depression. As a young boy, my father lived on his family’s homestead in Kansas—until a massive swarm of locust ate all the crops and the farmhouse burned down. In other words, he grew up on a farm in the Midwest during the Depression. Coincidence?
Here are the words:
The promise of living
With hope and thanksgiving
Is born of our loving
Our friends and our labor.
The promise of growing
With faith and with knowing
Is born of our sharing
Our love with our neighbor.
The promise of living
The promise of growing
Is born of our singing
In joy and thanksgiving.
For many a year I’ve known this field
And know all the work that makes her yield.
Are you ready to lend a hand?
I’m ready to work, I’m ready to lend a hand.
By working together we’ll bring in the harvest,
the blessings of harvest.
We plant each row with seeds of grain,
And Providence sends us the sun and the rain.
By lending a hand, by lending an arm
Bring out, bring out from the farm
Bring out the blessings of harvest.
Give thanks there was sunshine,
Give thanks there was rain,
Give thanks we have hands
To deliver the grain.
O let us be joyful,
O let us be grateful to the Lord
For his blessing.
The promise of ending
In right understanding
Is peace in our own hearts
And peace with our neighbor
The promise of living
The promise of growing
The promise of ending
Is labor and sharing and loving.
Berkeley Opera, April 2010 video by Jeremy Knight copyright 2010 echidnamedia
With SGF 2011 fast approaching, I’m sure I’m not the only speaker hard at work preparing my PowerPoint presentations. I can remember the old days when speakers brought actual slide trays full of film slides. I don’t miss the expense of those slides or the amount of room they took in my suitcase, and it is wonderful to be able to fix any typos you may discover at the last minute. Still PowerPoint has its limitations….
If you haven’t seen Peter Norvig‘s Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation, then you definitely should. It’s not new, but I just recently learned about it from my son. Click here to see what is possibly the most entertaining PowerPoint presentation ever created.
What motivates you? When I was a kid, I used to play a board game called Careers. In this game players moved around the board collecting points in three areas: ★ fame , $ fortune, and♥ happiness. The first player to achieve his chosen combination of points won the game. It was a fun game, but I used to scratch my head at the idea that success in life could be reduced to a linear formula consisting of fame, fortune, and happiness. (Yes, even as a ten-year-old, this seemed to me a pretty vacant idea of what life was about.)
When I was in graduate school, I heard about research showing that money can have a seemingly paradoxical effect on people. Paying people lots of money can actually reduce their motivation rather than increase it. What I didn’t know is that research on this topic has been ongoing. Then my son (Elliott Slaughter, Computer Sci. and Eng. major at UCSD and open source developer) sent me the link to a fascinating talk by writer Dan Pink. His talk is cleverly illustrated by RSA Animate.
So what does this have to do with SAS? Have you ever thought how amazing it is that we have local, regional, and international SAS user group meetings organized and executed primarily by volunteers? Why are so many people willing to work hundreds of hours without being paid a cent year after year after year? Pink explains why money is such a poor motivator, and what people really want. He uses open source software as his example, but you could easily substitute SAS users groups.
In this posting, I take a break from talking about SAS to talk about the books of the future and the future of books.
I do not own an e-reader. I am a collector of books, good old-fashioned hold-them-in-your-hands-and-turn-the-pages books. My collection includes a copy of Winne the Pooh with a copyright date of 1925 (one year before the book is said to have been first published, something I can’t quite figure out), and a copy of The Norman Rockwell Album, autographed by the artist with a tiny sketch of a dog. I, for one, am going to continue to buy and read paper books.
However, I can see how useful an e-reader would be for reading technical and academic books. And I thoroughly expect to use an e-reader in the future–when the technology is good enough. At SGF 2009, I had the privilege of seeing The Little SAS Book on a Kindle. The result was not impressive. The formatting was pathetic, even distressing in a book where formatting is an important part of communicating the content. The images we had worked so hard to create were missing! Clearly, e-readers have a ways to go…but perhaps not as far as I once thought.
In an article in IEEE Spectrum, March 2010, Jason Heikenfeld discusses the various contenders in the e-reader market and what we can expect to see in the not-so-distant future. Here’s a quote:
“Like the jet pack, it always seems to be a decade away. So why should you believe me now when I tell you that the do-all e-reader will be available in a decade? Read on.”
Here is a must-see video from Richard Wiseman. Ten great ways to entertain your friends and colleagues at a Christmas party–or better yet at the Kickback Party at SAS Global Forum April 11-14, 2010 in Seattle.
“Have fun!” That’s what I would say to my two sons as they went off to school every day, from kindergarten on up to high school. And I meant it. I firmly believe that learning is fun. As I explained to my kids, if you are not having fun, you are probably not learning much so you should try to have fun.
My oldest son (now in college) recently sent me a link to the article, A Mathematician’s Lament, written by Paul Lockart in 2002. This clever and insightful article humorously describes how traditional education sucks all the joy and imagination out of the study of mathematics. Of all the topics taught in primary and secondary education, mathematics is certainly the most mangled and misunderstood; but the same rigid approach is applied to some extent to every field. I have even seen art taught that way!
