Teaching with SAS Viya: First Report

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I teach a 400-level data analytics course to undergraduates at the Samford business school. Every semester, I have students apply the concepts we learn by using some analytics software. This semester, it was imperative that I choose a product that students could access from their own computers. We cannot all be together in the computer labs due to Covid.

For the first time, I am using SAS Viya for Learners. Currently, the students are learning SAS Visual Analytics through the Viya platform. SAS makes detailed tutorials that make it easy to teach software to a class. Something that I’m particularly happy about this Friday is that the product works. Class time is not getting chewed up by students who get errors that are difficult to troubleshoot.

(Of course, I tested the software myself before asking students to use it. Anyone who has taught large classes knows that there is no way to fully anticipate the problems that could arise when dozens of humans with different computers all try to do something.)

Something to know about SAS Viya for Learners is that it is free but the free version does not come with the whole range of functionality that SAS Visual Analytics offers. What seems most significant to me currently is that students cannot upload data into the program. There is a library of datasets to work with. That is what we are using for demonstrations and homeworks.

In previous semesters, students have been instructed to find their own data online and use that for their final project. This semester, students will use data that is pre-loaded into the SAS Viya for Learners library. There are many right ways to do a final project. Having less decisions to make about what data to use will allow students to focus more on the analysis and presentation.

So far, all we have done is logged in and built confidence with the interface. That’s the first step with any software. It works. The tutorials give excellent guidance. I will post another update as we get further along with SAS Viya.

No coding is needed (not even SAS coding). I have concluded that coding and data analytics are separate skills. They are both good skills to have. Sometimes teaching coding along with data analytics is appropriate. But the trade off needs to be recognized. Time spent learning to code, to some extent, takes away time spent learning about data analytics. Feel free to fight me on that in the comments if you disagree.

I also use a textbook to teach this course. So, SAS Viya is not the only resource.

Least Hypocritical Artist: Rich Mullins

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

I’m creating a new award: Least Hypocritical Artist Award. Rich Mullins is the winner.

The most human and not-overly-polished collection of works by Rich Mullins can be found here. You have to order it as a CD. I do not know of any digital platforms selling it. I bought a used copy for less than $3.

Since I have a CD player in my kitchen (left there by prior home owner) I have been listening to this album all week. Rich Mullins is a tremendously talented musician. These album tracks are live concert performances with jokes and introductions. Maybe I appreciate it especially this month because concerts and public gatherings cancelled for Covid. A DVD of a live concert is also included with the CD.

Because of social media, artists are getting in trouble when they say something that doesn’t fit the polished image their managers try to cultivate. Public figures disappoint sometimes. The spectacular fall of Jerry Falwell last month is an example of someone who presented a certain image to the world that turned out to be false.

Rich Mullins claimed to be a Christian, but he didn’t claim to be perfect. Rich Mullins put his whole heart and life out there. No surprises. You can’t disappoint your fans if you never tried to hide anything. Mullins was a bit self-deprecating in public but radically generous in his private life. He followed the example of St. Francis of Assisi. He lived very simply despite his modest professional success.

Mullins tragically died in a car accident at the age of 41 in 1997, when I was still too young to fully appreciate him. You can find his best selling albums and you can buy his popular songs on iTunes. This album is the best one that I have found for getting to know the man.

Leaves Drop in August

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Every year, the first few falling leaves catch me by surprise. ‘Summer can’t be over yet,’ I think. ‘Get back on those trees! It’s not even September. Starbucks isn’t even serving pumpkin yet!’

Pandemic or no pandemic, time keep passing. My children grow older, whether I squeeze every drop out of their childhood or not.

Those falling leaves represent this stage of my life slipping away. Living with young children is not all fun. I am lucky to be able to build a career and a young family at the same time. I understand that some women are constrained to choose one or the other.

If I did stay home with my kids full-time, then I would experience a greater total number of their precious moments. Those precious moments feel like the best of life. On the other hand, I imagine that when they inevitably grow up and away from me, the separation might be even more painful if I had been a stay at home mom. The leaves do not take sides in this debate. A few leaves drop in August. No matter how you spent your summer, it’s over.

Views on Christian Atonement

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An outsider to the Church might assume that Christians agree on all of the details concerning Jesus-saved-us-from-our-sins. Things are not as simple as they appear. I recall a podcast episode in which investor Peter Thiel pushed back against the idea that the New Testament is tidy or straightforward. Thiel said “I think Christ is a very complex, very ambiguous figure in many ways, which makes the interpretation quite difficult.”

Some of that complexity is captured in an excellent new article “The Atonement Wars“. This explores exactly what happens to Christians and their guilt of sin, in light of Jesus’s death on the cross and resurrection. I recommend the whole article.

Here is a view from the Greek Orthodox tradition that might be unfamiliar to American Protestants who are used to thinking about Atonement in dry legal terms.

“Ontological theories” is a broad term to comprehend the teachings of many Greek-speaking church fathers, mainly in the eastern half of the old Roman Empire and mainly from 180 A.D. onward….

This scheme is an “ontological” (whole being) substitution by Christ to deal with the entire power of sin in humans, rather than primarily a legal substitution addressing the guilt of sin before God’s justice. It is sometimes characterized as a “medical” model, stressing the healing of sick humanity rather than the judicial acquittal of a guilty humanity. Much of subsequent Eastern Orthodox theology, such as stressing the Incarnation and Resurrection, and experientially participating in the divine “energies” so as to become more and more God-like (“theosis”), is an elaboration of this ontological approach pioneered by Irenaeus. As with the Ransom Theory, the various flavors of Ontological atonement were subsumed by Aulen under the “Christus Victor” or “classic” rubric.

The Atonement Wars

If you read modern theology books and blogs, you probably have not had many opportunities to hear what the Church Fathers have said. The church fathers are people such as Ignatius of Antioch whose writing did not make it into the Bible but who were writing much closer to the time of Jesus than we stand today. “The Atonement Wars” explores the views of early Christians on salvation. I also recommend a separate blog devoted to the church fathers on the Letters to Creationists site.

Whether you attend church twice a week or never, I recommend this clear writing on ideas that shaped our civilization.

Philosophy from a POW: Wittgenstein via Keynes

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

For now, I will not write blog posts on the weekend. This weekend I made a little progress reading through (500+ page) The Price of Peace about John Maynard Keynes. This is not an economics textbook, although you will come away from it with a better understanding of “Keynesian economics”. The author presents the most intriguing parts of a life that could fill both a salacious tabloid and a respectable financial newspaper.

Here’s a story that surprised me:

Previous chapters describes Keynes’ involvement in winning World War I. He had a literal seat at the table for negotiating resulting peace and reparations agreements. Before the war, intellectuals from central Europe were exchanging ideas with Keynes at Cambridge University.

The horrific WWI pitted some of these Cambridge friends against each other, since some were British and others happened to be born in Hungary or Austria. Some died and never got to re-join the conversation. Brilliant Ludwig Wittgenstein ended up on a POW camp near Italy after the war.

Keynes used his government privileges to get Wittgenstein’s manuscript shipped out of the POW camp and into the hands of Bertrand Russell of Cambridge. This led to the English-language publication of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. According to The Price of Peace, Keynes’ own work on philosophy was completely eclipsed by Wittgenstein’s book. The book that might easily have ended up burned or thrown in the garbage of a POW camp.

Would Keynes and Wittgenstein blog if they were alive today? Would they have produced brilliant books, or would they be too distracted by Reddit and video games?

Bento Lunchbox Centerfold

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The magazine version of school lunches is like the magazine version of humans. It’s unbelievable. My header image for this post is a picture I took of a glossy centerfold in Parents magazine.

I can’t stop looking at these bright colors and whimsical shapes. Are there parents who cut food into stars for their kids on a daily basis? As soon as women were told that we don’t have to physically measure up to supermodels, we immediately joined the bento lunch rat race. Check out this one from Instagram!

Personally, I am content to drool over the contrasting bright colors in the pictures of supermodel bento lunches and yet also never make them myself. I am new to the school lunch packing world. So far I have made PB&J on wheat every day. Take it or leave it, kid. Nothing smiles at my son when he opens his lunchbox.

As much as I refuse to join the bento beauty contest, I do like to pack fun sides in my son’s lunch. Fruit, cookies or pretzels add crunch. It was the cute unattainable pictures that inspired me to invest in this bento-style lunchbox.

That link will take you to the product on Amazon that I bought and really like. My 5 year old can navigate the snaps. It’s well made. You can take it apart and clean it easily. The extra compartments make it easy to add snacks that stay crisp.

The alternative is to send several items in zip lock plastic bags that mush around in a (semi-waterproof, maybe) zipper lunchbox. ‘When I was a boy’ (girl, actually) that’s what we had. I love NOT having that mess of moist flaccid baggies to deal with.

Econ Pop Up: Lunch boxes are qualitatively better than they used to be. Cell phones are obviously better than they used to be. This makes is difficult to accurately measure inflation. The US government tries. They track how prices of products change over time. Usually, products become a bit more expensive every year. We say that the real purchasing power of $100 declines with inflation. However, I’m glad that I live today. I’d rather have $100 to spend today on our better stuff than $100 to spend in 1994 when I was toting my soggy lunchbox to school.

Assume the worst of online retailers

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I’m so embarrassed every time I fall for a scam on the internet. I like to think of myself as too smart for that. Since I just did it again today, I would like to share.

When you are on a retail website and you see beautiful photos of products and impossibly low prices, assume it’s a scam. If it’s not a trusted site like Amazon or Etsy, assume they will take your money and you will never get a quality item. You might be able to use the customer service email that they might have provided to ask for your money back.

If you are looking at glossy photos and wanting very badly for the deal to be legitimate, there is a good chance that the good people of the internet are already chatting about whether or not the site is a scam. Do that research BEFORE you put in your credit card information. Don’t do it AFTER you have paid and suddenly get a sinking feeling.

Code Burst: Podcast on Coding Bootcamps

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

Journalist and researcher Henry Kronk has a podcast about a coding bootcamp aimed at the population in Appalachia that has seen their economic opportunities decline with the loss of many coal mining jobs.

The primary reason for recommending this podcast is that retraining the American workforce for tech jobs is huge news. If it only takes 3 months of classes to turn any unemployed ex-miner into a highly-paid computer programmer, then let’s fund the heck out of coding bootcamps. The bootcamp that is the subject of this podcast did benefit from some public funding. Unfortunately, the teachers did not deliver everything that they promised to their student or to the US government.

Code Burst introduces the listener to a fascinating cast of real characters. I have been studying aggregate statistics on this topic for years, but I learned a lot from these anecdotes. If programming sounds boring but you liked the podcast S-Town, then I would encourage you to check out Henry Kronk’s work. There is intrigue and drama to go along with discussions of whether Ruby on Rails is superior to Java for web programming.

Unlike this bootcamp for miners, some of the other bootcamps that appear to have the best outcomes for students carefully screen the people they are willing to take on. There is some value added to the intense training provided for students who already have significant coding skills, but it would be incorrect to assume that any American chosen at random would benefit from the same training.

Students who appear to benefit from coding bootcamps:

  • often had some high level skills before they started, which could include programming experience
  • usually work extremely hard for very long hours, meaning that they forgo opportunities to make money or advance in another career during the period of the bootcamp

I’ll end with the description from the podcast:

In the practice of coal mining, there’s something known as rock burst. It happens in deep mines and tunnels around the world. Deep drilling causes the rock to shift and buckle. Shards can unexpectedly burst from the tunnel walls, injuring or killing miners.

Code Burst is a story about a violent, unexpected shift in the structure of the global economy. It involves the growing skills gap, the growing tech industry, the growing obsolescence of higher education, and one married couple who either tried to make a difference, or tried to make a buck. This is a story about trust.

New Blog: Via Egnatia

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My friend Dr. Alex Salter started a blog a month before I did. We are almost blog twins. His blog, which has multiple contributors, is Via Egnatia. You know it’s going to be good when the name is in Latin and immediately sends you to Google a fascinating ancient road.

These posts are deep. The modern mind (I’m thinking of you, dear reader, and myself) likes to go deep but not for too long. Thus, a blog post is the perfect size.

Liberal Economics? is Alex’s first post. Alex has articulated what the opposition thinks:

Perhaps a well-rounded education contains a bit of economics, as a concession to the distasteful reality of our calculating, commercial society.

Alex’s summary of what many people think about economics classes

I believe that my students can incorporate the economics they learn in our department with the “great books” they read as Freshman at Samford. Economics makes a student more well-rounded. Commercial society is not distasteful. You don’t have to take my word for it. Alex is going to convince you, one blog post at a time.

I will be posting in the future about the elective course I teach in which students will study The Grapes of Wrath alongside Tyler Cowen alongside a mainstream economics textbook.

Back to school, in person

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For almost 30 consecutive years, I have had the privilege of starting school in the Fall. This year, I’m wearing a mask and I’m only coming to campus when I teach. I just taught my first class to 18 people in the room and to more than 20 students who logged in virtually. It wasn’t perfect. I had to restart the live stream twice.

My Samford students were very helpful. They are happy to be back in school, even though it’s nowhere near what we like to offer in terms of events and activities. The students who I couldn’t see chatted in to thank me and even told me I was doing a great job.

I don’t anticipate having any trouble with safety rules being followed during class time. Of course, there is the potential for things to go awry. Only time will tell if the rules and cooperation can allow our campus to stay open until Thanksgiving. As our President keeps saying, we are only opening for 100 days.

Like most colleges, we required every single member of the campus to get a test before starting back. The problem is that positive cases are still circulating in Jefferson county where we all live.

As far as I can tell, universal masking rules in the state of Alabama have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus as more people emerge from their houses to shop and even eat at restaurants. The opening of many schools across the state will be a big test.