SAS loves stats: Mark Bailey

Annette Marett
Annette Marett|May 8, 2013

Mark Bailey

Statistics. Should this branch of study call its home with mathematics or the sciences? Mark Bailey is a self-proclaimed science enthusiast, so you can guess which way he leans.  As a full-time instructor with JMP, Mark use statistics in his job to help customers decipher their data. That means a lot of travel, but he enjoys the variety of interesting people and business challenges. A favorite quote of Mark’s is, “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.” In his spare time, Mark squeezes in everything from fishing, photography and brewing his own beer to breezing through audio books while he hikes 8 to ten miles a day. Enjoy Mark’s story and also be sure to check out the rest of the SAS loves stats series as we focus on the International Year of Statistics.

What do you do at SAS?
I am a Principal Analytical Training Consultant in the Education division of JMP.  I’ve recently celebrated my fifteenth anniversary with SAS.

What’s your educational background?
My BS from SUNY Fredonia, as well as my MS and PhD from the University of Rochester, are in chemistry. I was a science geek for as long as I can remember. You know, dissecting worms and making concoctions in the basement lab. My academic research was in transition metal catalysis (inorganic chemistry) and the mechanism of hemoglobin binding (biophysical inorganic chemistry). I also became the de facto computer scientist in our group for real-time data acquisition and analysis, and early work in visualization of protein structure.

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Once a geek, always a geek – and by the way geeks are totally cool!

Jennifer Marchi
Jennifer Marchi|May 8, 2013

Andrew McAfee, MIT

I’m a geek at heart – I always have been and I always will be.  I love technology and I love math.  I love that my job combines both.  But you know what is even better?  In today’s world of big data and data visualization, it is totally fashionable to be a geek.

Last week, I attended SAS Global Forum where Andrew McAfee talked about HiPPOs and Geeks. HiPPO refers to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, meaning these people make decisions based on experience, intuition and likely some data.  Geek refers to us number crunchers – those who make decisions purely based on the data.  A HiPPO can also be a geek – but in today’s business world, most – by in large – are not.

As McAfee conveyed, it takes a leap of faith as a Hippo to follow the data – especially if it contradicts the HiPPO’s intuition.  The best type of Hippo will be the HiPPO that sets aside their personal belief and lets the data rule.  Many are using data to make decisions but, are they truly letting the data guide them?  Or is there still a very natural tendency to let intuition and rationale heavily influence decisions, even when confronted with the data?

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The first data visualisation?

Philip Male
Philip Male|May 8, 2013

As a boy growing up in the 1970s, I was fascinated in particular by dinosaurs.  I knew all their names, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Diplodocus, Triceratops etc.  And I could also remember in which geological time period they lived, and on which continent; and what they ate, often each other of course!

To work all this out, I would pore over colourful time charts, with millions of years BC on one axis and types of dinosaurs shown as long rivers of colour.  When they first appeared, and when they died out.  Such charts had been around for a very long time, and were generally used to how when famous people such Plato, or Napoleon had lived.  The first one in fact appeared in 1765 and was designed by Joseph Priestley. Read More »

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Mount Mayon Eruption reminds me that mobile phones have changed lives

Ken King
Ken King|May 7, 2013

Posing with Ben the mountain guide

Aboard a scuba diving boat off the east coast of Tico Island in the Philippines, my eyes kept turning to gaze upon Mount Mayon, reputed to be the world’s most perfectly cone-shaped volcano.  Although I was enjoying diving in the warm tropical water, I was looking forward to climbing Mt Mayon once the diving was finished. I thought about that trip today when I read the sad news that five climbers on Mount Mayon were killed by an eruption.

From a distance one would think that the slopes of the volcano are one long smooth ramp.  Once the hike starts, however, it becomes obvious that hiring an experienced guide was a prudent investment. Ben was my guide for the hike.  He lives at the base of the mountain where his small farm keeps him busy most days.  For several years the farm could not generate enough income for his family, though, so Ben resorted to working overseas.  The arrival of low-cost mobile service means that Ben can be contacted when some hapless tourist like me wants to climb the volcano.  Ben makes enough extra income from guiding climbers so that he is able support his family without needing to leave the country for extended periods to find work.

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What they saw at the evolution: Davenport, Dyché usher the arrival Analytics 3.0

Barry Gay
Barry Gay|May 7, 2013

Jill Dyché and Tom Davenport discuss Analytics 3.0

In the late 1990s, Jill Dyché, co-founder of Baseline Consulting, worked on a multi-year engagement to stand up Bell South’s business intelligence and analytics strategy.

“This was heavy-duty programming; this was heavy-duty code,” she recalls. “SQL is not necessarily optimized for set data to do this kind of thing, but we did it. And after three-and-a-half months, we actually had some really interesting discoveries on the data.”

The project paid for itself right away. So imagine the return on investment such effort would produce today when the same project would take seconds, not months.

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What is the future of big data in health care?

Becky Graebe
Becky Graebe|May 6, 2013

Big data might be daunting, but Matthew J. Becker, Senior Director and Global Head of Statistical Programming at inVentive Health Clinical, says the goal remains simple for those in health care and life sciences: cure disease and improve health outcomes.

Speaking last week at SAS Global Forum, Becker noted that most people had probably heard of the three big data Vs – volume, velocity and variety – but he believes there are two more Vs merging:

  1. Value is increasingly important with multiple stakeholders who place different value on the data gathered. For instance, the value of the data from a patient’s glucose monitor is different for the doctor, the device manufacturer and the patient. 
  2. Validity is also an important consideration as accuracy and completeness factor huge in decision-making.

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Big names talk big products

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|May 5, 2013

When users attend SAS Global Forum, they often look forward to hearing from the big names of SAS. To name a few: CEO Jim Goodnight, VP and CMO Jim Davis, and Co-Founder John Sall. Inside SAS Global Forum caught up with these busy executives on the demo floor to talk about SAS Visual Analytics, SAS High Performance Analytics, Customer Intelligence 6, In-Memory Analytics and JMP 11. Watch to learn more: Read More »

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Discover something interesting and useful: A data mining overview

Kim Darnofall
Kim Darnofall|May 4, 2013

A contract instructor for SAS since 1981 and an NC State University professor, David A. Dickey has a passion for statistics and sharing that passion with others. On Tuesday at SAS Global Forum he gave a general overview of data mining, touching on decision trees, regression trees, logistic regression, neural networks, association analysis, text mining and more during his one-hour talk.

To illustrate the concepts and show real-life application of data mining, Dickey used data from the Framingham Heart Study, police reports on car accidents in Portugal and the US space shuttle missions.

People like decision trees, Dickey said, because they reflect the way we make decisions in our life anyway. As a light-hearted example, Dickey cited “speed dating,” where people ask each other a string of yes-no questions and then make a final decision as to whether they want to date a particular person.

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Engineered to win at Jeopardy!

Lisa Arney
Lisa Arney|May 3, 2013

It’s usually hard to draw a big crowd for the final session of a four-day conference, especially when it starts at 8 a.m. But this year, SAS Global Forum attendees set their alarms and got up early to hear how Roger Craig used statistics to help him win the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.

“I’ll admit it. I guess I was a little obsessive about my Jeopardy! preparation,” he joked.

Craig held the audience’s attention with his fascinating account of what he did to prepare for his ultimate win on the popular game show. He said he “reverse engineered the game of Jeopardy!” in order to increase his probability of answering questions correctly. That involved creating a computer program that clustered question topics and sampled the data to identify where he was weakest. With that information, he systematically studied for the show by learning a little about a lot.

“Instead of taking weeks, months or years to go through 200,000 questions, I was able to predict which ones might come up in seconds,” he said.

Craig purported that his strategy for Jeopardy! can work in everyday life as well, proposing that we “augment human capital with predictive analytics.” Just like he created a "modified statistical snapshot of his brain" with a bubble chart, Craig said we can help predict the onslaught of diseases like Alzheimer’s by tracking memory loss.

Watch Craig's full presentation on our livestream channel:

Watch live streaming video from sasglobalforum at livestream.com
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Targeting Iron Man with a location based ad

Ken King
Ken King|May 3, 2013

I have not yet seen Iron Man 3, some of which was filmed here in SAS’s Executive Briefing Center, but I wish I had a direct interface from my brain into a computer. So, like Tony Stark I could defend the world against evil or at least never again suffer that moment of embarrassment when I see someone I know but whose name is temporarily hiding somewhere in my brain. But for now that’s science fiction.

What is not science fiction is sending ads to mobile devices.

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