So I’m back from ENAR and back from spring break. I’ve ben greeted back to grad school by a midtern on Friday night from 6-8pm. What a fun time for a midterm!

Let me first start by saying that San Antonio is awesome. The river walk is great. I at at two great Mexican restaurants for lunch two days in a row and they were both incredible. And I drank Shiner Bock the whole time, which I highly recommend.

Anyway, on Sunday night I presented a poster at ENAR (they served Shiner Bock during the poster presentations) about a paper that we wrote (and recently published) about synthetic data with binary variables. I met some very interesting people who stopped by my poster. One guy who stopped by informed me that he coined the term predictive mean matching (which i referenced on my poster). So, I asked him who he was, and he told me he was Rod Little (He’s kind of a big deal). He wrote the book on multiple imuptation: Little, R.J.A. & Rubin, D.B. (1987). Statistical Analysis with Missing Data. New York:
John Wiley. So that was kind of neat. (I just visited Rod Little’s website and apparently this is the “most useful of all links”. (Here is another interesting article called “Calibrated Bayes: A Bayes/Frequentist Roadmap”.)

The next day I spoke with some people from SAS and STATA, as well as, some recruiters from Smith-Hanley (who I got my first job through) and Cambridge Group. The SAS people told me about a product call JMP, which I was very impressed by it. The STATA people told me that I could buy a student STATA license for like $55 dollars and then use it commerically after I graduate. (As opposed to several thousand dollars for a SAS license that only lasts a year.) And I could use it for as long as I wanted to. The only thing I would have to pay fo rwould be upgrades. So STATA has that going for them. I am definately gonig to try it out.

Cheers.