A week ago, SAS "wusses" got together in Long Beach, California for another successful WUSS conference.  Personally, I really enjoy all SAS user conferences as it gives me an opportunity to see the creative ways in which SAS users are exploiting our software.

One such case was the paper "Power plant emissions, pediatric asthama and school attendance:  A spatial identification analysis" presented by Anton Bekkerman.  In this paper Bekkerman et. al. presented the impact on attendance for school children living near coal fired power plants.  The item of interest to me was the use of GTL template graphics to create the map of the US, and place bubbles on the power plant locations sized by the number of school children in the area.  This used the ideas presented in the article on Map Overlays earlier in this blog.  It was gratifying to know we provided some useful information in this blog.

Another interesting paper was "Is the Legend in your SAS/GRAPH still telling the right story" by Alice Cheng.  Alice did a wonderful job describing how visual attributes like color and symbols as assigned to group values based on the order of their occurence in a data set for clinical use cases.  She described five different ways to ensure the colors and symbols are consistently assigned to the group values across multiple use cases.  She also provided a good primer on the new Discrete and Range Attribute Map features in SAS 9.3 ODS Graphics.

A presenttion by Geeta Mahendra on "Forest and Funnel Plots" showed how Funnel Plots can be used to show the data without spurious ranking where the eye is automatically drawn to the outliers.

I presented multiple papers and super demos that were well received:

• Now you can annotate your statistical graphics procedure graph by Dan Heath.  This paper describes the new annotation facility in SG procedures, which is very similar to annotate in SAS/GRAPH, with a few important differences.
• Quick results with ODS Graphics Designer by Sanjay Matange.  In this HOW, I describe how to use the interactive GUI based Designer application to create graphs with no coding.

Next week -> on to MWSUG in Minneapolis.  I am presenting multiple papers on Effective Graphics, GTL and ODS Graphics Designer.  I am also presenting a 1/2 day seminar on clinical graphs using SG procedures.  I hope to see you there.