On September 10, 2001, I was attending a law enforcement conference in Atlantic City, NJ. While I have attended hundreds of similar meetings, this conference stands out for several reasons. First, and most obvious, it was the eve of the day where most of our lives were indelibly altered. Second,
For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the communications team of the National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P), of which SAS is a partner and the analytics provider. That experience was heavy on my mind as I recently watched the film Contagion. I may drop some minor
Halloween is around the corner and children everywhere will wear masks throughout their neighborhoods for a night of trick-or-treating fun and, likely, too much candy. A masking has also occurred in education policy with the No Child Left Behind Act, sans the candy at the end of the night. That
With an increasing volume of curriculum to cover and no time to spare, teachers often hit the ground running with the full throttle rigor and relevance critical to teaching and learning. However, I argue that the first two R’s are futile if teachers don’t have meaningful relationships with their students.
Private sector vendors/suppliers seeking to conduct business with government often find frustration with the maze of policy and legislative hurdles encountered during the procurement process. As difficult as the experience may have been from the private sector perspective, take a moment to look at the other side of the procurement
In 2009, SAFETEA-LU—the legislation that outlines federal transportation funding for the states—expired. Since then, members of Congress have been kicking the can down the road, passing funding extensions instead of passing legislation. The major impact of this failure to act is that the U.S. continues to slip further and further
As schools across the country delve into a new year, I want to bring my readers back to teaching basics with Part 2 of my Three R’s series on Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. Here's Part 1. As students flood our halls and classrooms, are they eager and excited for the challenging year ahead? Do
The downturn in the economy beginning in 2008 and continuing even to now has put tremendous pressure on local governments to do “less with less”. In the past when economic downturns caused service level cut backs the cry was to do “more with less”. The idea was to identify ways
‘Context’ defined (as cited from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary): 1: the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning; and, 2: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs: environment, setting. While context is clearly important, today it is consistently
Hurricane Irene impacted 20% of the US population and will cost billions in recovery dollars. Now that the water has begun to subside, the real long term work begins. And it is this work that can be another disaster, or, a real economic benefit to a state. How so? FEMA
A couple of weeks ago, SAS Press acquisitions editor Shelley Sessoms gamely agreed to participate in SAS Publishing's first ever "live" Facebook discussion. Shelley is an all-star author recruiter with an average RBI (real book interest) of acquiring 40 book proposals a year. Many SAS and JMP users, as well
Growing up in Michigan, I, like all state residents, learned early on that the lower peninsula of Michigan is shaped like a mitten. This piece of information has served me well all my life; whenever I meet a stranger who wants to know where in Michigan I grew up, I
A few months ago I wrote a blog entry titled "SAS/GRAPH "SG" Procedures--Not Just for Statisticians!" It was so well received that I was invited to open for Celine Dion at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas! Well, not really, but I was invited (along with co-blogger Cynthia Zender) to give
Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that
I was building a nice little PDF report the other day. I love the way ODS PDF replicates the SAS Results window navigation structure as PDF bookmarks, but... I'd much rather write the text for the bookmarks myself. So, I decided to "use the SAS" and make ODS do my
Recently, I had the privilege of visiting one of our small to midsize business (SMB) customers, Oberweis Dairy, a family owned, 90-year-old business located in the Chicago area. Essentially, Oberweis has morphed from a family dairy farm to a significant, regional food manufacturer and retailer. With 39 retail stores, 40,000
Contributed by Gary Meek, Director, Documentation Development My team at SAS has tried many different things to get customers to tell us how we can serve them better. We’ve contacted customers directly (with their permission), worked with other customer touch points at SAS like Technical Support, Professional Services, and Education.
As Stacey mentioned in her last blog post, she’s a fan of the television show Lost, as I am too. Often our final few minutes of study group will discuss the numerous theories regarding the Lost castaways and their island stories and sideways stories. For 5 minutes or so, it’s
In one of my previous posts, I challenged myself to use SAS to create a monthly household budget and I’m happy to report that I have started this process. I have a few months worth of data and have begun to merge this information into data sets. With the combination
SAS Global Forum will be here before you know it, and we’ll have the opportunity to meet with the world’s largest assembly of SAS users. If you’ve attended before, you know about what to expect. There are lots of learning opportunities available on Sunday morning and afternoon, so if you
I’ve spent quite a while now going through chapter 8, “Creating Enhanced List and Summary Reports,” in the Base Certification Prep Guide. This topic should be straightforward, I keep telling myself. So why did I score 40% on the quiz? Thinking that I probably needed to delve a little deeper,
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it. -Rene Descartes A great quote to apply to many things in life, including this path towards certification. Realizing that I needed a review, I enrolled in a three day, onsite Programming I class here in
Last Friday I had the pleasure of spending a rewarding hour sitting with Jan Squillace, a technical support analyst for SAS. Jan actually reached out to Christine and me, inviting us to “sit in on an hour of Tech Support Phone Duty, just to see what happens in the real
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and a very happy 2010 so far. We’re lucky enough to work for a company that closes between Christmas and New Years’, so it was an extra long break for all of us here at SAS. Along with almost
We watched our favorite holiday movie last weekend: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Most who know me would be surprised to read that I start sobbing at about the time that Mr. Gower buys George his—alas, unused—around-the-world suitcase and don’t stop until (spoiler alert!) Clarence gets his wings. One
As the year comes to a close, you have no doubt seen by our many book promotions how busy all of us in SAS Press have been this year. For me personally, it has been a very productive and gratifying year to see three of my book projects become a
Tuesday was a great day at M2009. I was able to talk to SAS Press author Randy Collica, who is working on a new edition of CRM Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner. I interviewed him and Curt Hinrichs, another SAS Press author, who is a coauthor of the
