What can a skateboarder teach you about Hadoop?

Keith Renison
Keith Renison|March 11, 2014

Have you ever wondered how extracting value from big data might be like skateboarding?  Really, it never crossed your mind? Actually, to be honest I had never considered it either, not even one little bit.  At least, not until I watched a skateboarding legend explain, “The Art of Good Practice” at a big data conference last month.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Rodney Mullen, considered one of the most influential skateboarders in the history of the sport, presented at the 2014 Strata Santa Clara conference.  Had it not been for his O’Reilly Media t-shirt, I would have guessed he was at the wrong conference.   But as I began to listen to his message, it became clear that he was indeed in the right place, talking to just the right people.

Here are the three things Rodney taught me:

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Did you know analytics did that?

David Pope
David Pope|March 10, 2014

It is always important to continue to sell the value of analytics within your organization, especially to your leaders.   Usually, these type of results are delivered via reports, dashboards, or emails.   However did you know that analytics:

  1. Detects when expensive machinery like electrical submersible pumps (ESP) or oil platforms need maintenance before they break.
  2. Helped find the pieces of the space shuttle Columbia by simulating and predicting where the pieces would most likely have landed.
  3. Allowed a college professor to save her husband's leg.  He had diabetes, and his doctors recommended amputation below the knee. However, his wife used text mining on new diabetes clinical trials and came up with valid alternatives that his doctors agreed would work.
  4. Helps protect credit card purchases by detecting fraud.
  5. Helps improve North Carolina citizens' safety by tying information together across multiple law enforcement agencies and surfacing that information to officers out on the streets.
  6. Reduces the adverse effects of administering multiple vaccines in different order for different patients.
  7. Discovers root cause of manufacturing process issues and helps fix them before they become a major recall.
  8. Helps detect criminal activity associated with electricity usage patterns.
  9. Helps determine best treatment of MRSA.
  10. Predicts the NCAA basketball teams to be invited to the NCAA tournament (100% for 2013).

These are just ten of my current favorite analytics successes. They're the types stories we need to tell our children to make them more interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), wouldn't you agree?  To find out other interesting ways analytics are used across a variety of industries you may want to attend SAS Global Forum in Washington D.C. March 23rd through the 26th.

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Everyday visual analytics

Jennifer Marchi
Jennifer Marchi|March 7, 2014

Imagine you're a business analyst who just discovered a pattern or trend that could significantly help your organization. What do you do next?

You share it.

Using SAS® Visual Analytics, you've published your results to the Web and mobile device before, but this time you'd rather work with your findings in Microsoft Excel and add them to a presentation for your manager.

No problem!

SAS Visual Analytics integrates with SAS® Office Analytics – enabling you to display visual analytics content in Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook and SharePoint as well. That means you can open the reports you created in Visual Analytics Designer or Explorer and access your "favorites" to show colleagues and managers your exciting discoveries in a convenient, familiar format.

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Scholastic chess: A gateway to STEM education

Michael Thomas
Michael Thomas|March 6, 2014
Before the chess tournament

The crowd before the chess tournament

For a lot of North Carolina chess families, this past weekend was action-packed. It was the 40th North Carolina K-12 Chess Championship, a three day event hosted by Chess Achieves and sponsored by SAS. Many families drove in on Friday from as far away as the mountains in the west and the beaches in the east. Triangle area chess families didn’t need the downtown Raleigh hotel rooms, but they did need to battle for parking with all the families coming to the big Lego event in the bottom level of the Raleigh Convention Center.

The beginning of a scholastic chess tournament is always remarkable. There were over 700 players at this tournament and they all had parents and coaches with them. As the players took their seats, the rooms held a cacophony of inquisitive young questions as well as age-old advice: “Watch for Scholar’s Mate,” “Knights before bishops,” “Take your time,” “Write your move down first, then make your move,” “Don’t do that thing you did last time.” Read More »

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Machine learning dominates Strata 2014 in Santa Clara

Phil Weiss
Phil Weiss|March 3, 2014
SAS booth at Strata conference

The SAS booth at Strata

Data asset management and analytic processing associated with big data were main topics of interest at the recent Strata conference in Santa Clara, California.  Hosted in Silicon Valley, the conference attracted some of the brightest and most intelligent data scientists from America’s top research and academic institutions.  Yet, to my ears, the real buzz was around the terms “machine learning” and “deep analytics,” meaning that the conference attendees seemed keenly interested in learning more about how to run predictive analytics on their large collections of data.

SAS debuted new statistical modelling capabilities for Hadoop at the conference.  This offering, SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop, is targeted specifically at the data science community. It offers a familiar environment for interactive programming, backed by the advanced statistical algorithms of SAS.  Wayne Thompson, SAS’ Chief Data Scientist,  gave a great presentation and demo, and other staff members had a busy time in the demo center discussing it and other SAS offerings for Hadoop.

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Let’s get ‘To the Point’ of internal communications

Karen Lee
Karen Lee|February 28, 2014

When you think of internal communications in a large- or medium-sized company, what comes to mind?

Perhaps an Internal Communications department that delivers corporate-level news, announcements and features to employees, helps with executive communications, publishes content on the intranet, etc.? While that’s often true, it’s only part of the story. Internal communications goes way beyond the activities of a corporate Internal Comms group, and includes:

  • Interaction between managers and their employees.
  • Internal social media interaction among employees.
  • Departmental team-building events.
  • Water-cooler conversations.
  • A greeting or “thank you” uttered in the hallways.

Open communication among employees is vital to any organization’s success, and a crucial communication channel is the one between managers and their employees. Such communication helps employees understand and align with divisional/departmental goals, feel engaged and connected to the company leadership, and understand their own place within the organization.

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Why analytics is better than simple if-then business rules

David Pope
David Pope|February 27, 2014

What's the differences between predictive analytics and basic reporting? Predictive analytics provides insight about what will happen in the future. Basic reporting only looks at past performance. Why is this difference difficult to grasp? It's partly because transitioning to predictive analytics requires change. And most people don't embrace change.

Take an example from the energy industry. What happens when one company changes from historical reporting on electric meter fails to new reports that integrate predictive analytics?   (Don't stop reading if you're not in the electricity industry. The same principles apply for pump failure in oil and gas production as well as many similar problems in other industries.)

When reviewing historical failure reports, it's natural to look for similar readings or characteristics that occurred prior to the failure, group other meters into similar looking clusters and monitor them in an attempt to detect failures faster in the future. This is a rules-based approach. The problem? Identifying one fact, like low voltage readings (X=low voltage readings) one week prior (Y=one week) to failure, ignores all the other interactions that may play an important role in meter failure.

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2 things you need to improve productivity and business decisions

Jennifer Marchi
Jennifer Marchi|February 25, 2014

How can you access relevant data quickly, even when it's big, complex data? How can you make more strategic business decisions with data and analytics?  And make them faster?

You need a two things: analytics and self-service business intelligence. This combination makes it easy to first understand and then present data for decisions.

Want to learn how your IT organization can empower users to do MORE with their data and information sharing?  How they can do it while still designing the data and maintaining control of data governance? Check out our recent presentation, "Self-Service BI + Analytics = Productivity and Smart Business Decisions." 

You'll learn about how to achieve self-service BI, ad hoc data discovery, analytic visualizations and information sharing all in one place.

Once you've watched the Webcast, remember you can also try SAS Visual Analytics today.

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Treating analytic discovery and model development as a production environment

David Pope
David Pope|February 21, 2014

IT support levels for different processes and business applications depend on many factors. So how are analytics projects generally supported?

It's common for IT to view the implementation of advanced analytics as part of a production job or process, especially when analytic models are deployed into different operational systems that are viewed as production level systems.  However, it is common for IT to view the analytic discovery and model building process as a non-production or a development process.

Since the importance of using advanced analytics for strategic business purposes continues to be embraced by all types of industries, treating the analytic development process and related jobs as non-production is a mistake.

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A mountain of fun

Willie the Seeing Eye Dog
Willie the Seeing Eye Dog|February 20, 2014

All work and no play makes Ed a very dull boy. So, I took the family skiing last week. It was a blast. They had a good time out there shivering in the snow, doing stuff like: fall down, get up, repeat.  Not my idea of fun. I spent my vacation snoozing inside a nice warm lodge before a fire. Yeah.Ed is skiing with the help of Adaptive Sports Center instructors

We visited Snowshoe, West Virginia. It’s a great place to go for anyone wanting to try winter sports. And I do mean anyone. Ed’s visual impairment did not keep him off the slopes.  They have an adaptive ski program there, and he had a great time with those folks.

The team at the Adaptive Sports Center are happy to offer one-on-one lessons for people with hearing, visual, and developmental impairments. They’re available to instruct folks with 3 and 4 tWillie and his family at Snowshoerack skis, mono- and bi-skis. But don’t go the week beginning February 28. That’s when they hold their Wounded Veterans Camp.

And lest you think I never made it outside, this photo (on the left) is evidence that I did check it out once with Ed and one of his kids.

Thanks for checking in. It's time for me to get back to work.

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