Mathematical squiggles in SAS

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|February 12, 2013

John D. Cook shared a picture of “pretty squiggles” on his blog, as well as a prose description of the mathematics behind it. I’m more of a programmer than a mathematician, but I’ve attempted to transcribe his description into a SAS program. I used DATA step to generate the point [...]

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Implement BY processing for your entire SAS program

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|March 20, 2012

Most SAS procedures support the BY statement, which allows you to create a report or analysis for each distinct value of a variable in your data set. The syntax is simple, and SAS procedures are usually tuned to do a good job of processing the data efficiently. However, the BY [...]

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Reaching a dubious peak

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|January 27, 2012

So many of us struggle with this mountain. In fact, 68.27% of us get within sight of reaching the summit (while 95.47% of us are at least on a perceivable slope). We run, walk, crawl and sometimes slide our way uphill (from one direction or the other) until we finally [...]

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Do you mind if we dance with your DATEs (or DATETIMEs)?

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|November 15, 2011

I’ve been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I’ve come across a few SAS programs that have “opportunity for improvement” when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven’t, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite [...]

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Netflix streaming: Making every minute count

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|October 5, 2011

It turns out that I’m not receiving the maximum potential value from my Netflix streaming service.  Perhaps it’s because I place too much value on sleep. With my monthly subscription, I am permitted to view Netflix content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  In my house I have [...]

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Measuring the value of my DVD-by-mail movie service

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|September 19, 2011

Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household — a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the [...]

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Birthdays among friends

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|September 9, 2011

Earlier today, Rick posted interesting information about which time of year the most babies are born, at least in the USA. I don’t have data nearly as extensive as what’s available at the NCHS, but I do have a sample of birthday records to compare against Rick’s findings.  My sample [...]

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Hammer time with high school students

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|April 12, 2011

This morning I delivered a talk to visiting high school students at the SAS campus. The topic: using SAS to analyze Twitter content. Being teenagers, high school students are well familiar with Twitter. But this batch of students was also very familiar with SAS, as they all have taken SAS [...]

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This list goes to 11

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|December 24, 2010

It’s almost 2011, so let’s reflect on the top 11 posts (by number of visits in 2010) on this blog. Not all of these posts were written in 2010; in fact, some of these date back to 2007. But apparently they are oldies and goodies. 1. SAS 9.2 and SAS [...]

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Guess your Wait at the state fair

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|October 24, 2008

My family and I attended the North Carolina State Fair on Tuesday (weather was beautiful), and noticed two differences from previous years: Everything was more expensive — getting in, riding the rides, and especially the food. It was easier to get around, because it wasn’t so crowded. We didn’t have [...]

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