Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical. -Yogi Berra As Moneyball hits theaters on September 23, I know awareness and appreciation for analytics will spike. The thought of the little guy being able to outmaneuver their stronger, better equipped opponent resonates with many people and relates
One of the sweet new capabilities in 9.2 OLAP for cube developers is the Cube Job that is automatically created for each new cube. The job is used as a interface mechanism to schedule the cube refresh code without manually retrieving the PROC OLAP code and customizing it for scheduling which we "old"
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
Sunday marked 10 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forever changed our focus on threats to US security. Last week, SAS hosted the 7th annual Terrorism Financing and Money Laundering Forum, a day of information sharing among the key players from both the public and private sectors in the
The SAS Power Series Tour had its most recent stop in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose. This gave me another chance to test my hypothesis that firms in the Valley are not big users of analytics. My theory goes that high-tech firms are much more focused on creating
While talking to SAS users in Australia earlier this month, I often demonstrated the capabilities of the new Map Chart task in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. Creating map charts has never been easier: select your map data source, then select your response data source, and click Run. Voila! You've got
There is a lot of talk hither and yon about a “double-dip” recession. Not at all uncommon when you consider past recessions. Let’s take a look at some data from the June 2011 survey of senior financial executives from the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI to dig into the double dip theories. MAPI
We had a tornado in April, an earthquake on Tuesday, a drought all summer, and a hurricane arrives on Saturday. All I can figure is that Cary, NC has way too many sinners per capita. What's next -- pestilence? The BFD Makeover The BFD (and all SAS blogs) will now be
At the first panel discussion of the Premier Business Leadership Series on Tuesday morning, host Mark Jeffries introduced attendees to a new feature - the Clikapad wireless voting keypad. During each panel presentation throughout the conference, audience participation will be facilitated with polls via the keypads. Jeffries started the first panel discussion with this
The Platform Development team in SAS R&D has a vision for how SAS applications will be built and deployed in the future. It’s a vision that accounts for recent trends in cloud computing, high performance computing, open APIs and smart phone app stores. It’s also a vision that promises to
As part of the staffing efforts for the new SAS Center for Health Analytics and Insights (CHAI), SAS recently hired Dr. Graham Hughes, MD, as the company’s first Chief Medical Officer (CMO). When I heard the news, I sent a few questions to Graham to learn more about the new
SIFMA held its Dodd-Frank Impact Analysis Summit in New York City on July 13, bringing together almost 500 industry participants for a day-long discussion just prior to the first anniversary of the Act’s passage. In addition to Tim Ryan (SIFMA CEO), the summit included guest speakers Larry Kudlow, Evan Thomas
Recently, I was able to spend a morning with a group of analytics executives at the SAS Power Series in Chicago. I enjoyed it a lot because instead of pontificating about analytics to them, I got to hear about their challenges and approaches in a workshop format. There were a
Most of us grew up playing some type of sport and dreaming of becoming a collegiate or professional athlete. For me, it was a focus on dance and striving to be a professional ballerina. At some point we realized that in order to make this dream a reality, we’d have
One of the joys of statistics is that you can often use different methods to estimate the same quantity. Last week I described how to compute a parametric density estimate for univariate data, and use the parameters estimates to compute the area under the probability density function (PDF). This article
Due to the rapid changes in both the health care market and more specifically the amount of fraud being committed in it, it is even more important than ever to maintain some degree of life cycle management to update the analyses used to detect and identify aberrant activity. However, many
I had the pleasure to be the host of the Risk and Finance Insight Session on the second day of The Premier Business Leadership Series, where we discussed the subject of enterprise risk management and financial stewardship. With global, political and financial upheaval becoming the norm (and during the conference
In his new book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, world renowned theoretical physicist and futurologist Michio Kaku shared his view, and those of 300 other global top scientists, about what is in store for the rest of
Now that the flurry of SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas has died down, you can take a little time to catch up on some of the reading you said you'd get to. For instance, have you worked your way through the proceedings? They are located here. And I
No, BONEZONE is not the website of wayward legislators. It is, however, a trade journal of the orthopaedic devices industry, and the Summer 2011 issue features a nice mention of Forecast Value Added (FVA) analysis in an article by Tom Wallace. In "Forecasting: It's Getting Better," Tom refers to FVA
In a previous blog post, I presented a short SAS/IML function module that implements the trapezoidal rule. The trapezoidal rule is a numerical integration scheme that gives the integral of a piecewise linear function that passes through a given set of points. This article demonstrates an application of using the
In a previous article I discussed the situation where you have a sequence of (x,y) points and you want to find the area under the curve that is defined by those points. I pointed out that usually you need to use statistical modeling before it makes sense to compute the
As organizations confront the limits of forecasting, they finally realize the folly in a blind pursuit of unachievable levels of forecast accuracy. The best accuracy we can ever hope to achieve is limited by the nature -- the forecastability -- of what we are trying to forecast. Anything better than
SAS is the underwriter of a MeriTalk study released today that focuses on “The Federal Efficiency Opportunity”. The study uncovered meaningful insights into how federal managers and professionals are trying to meet their goals while facing enormous budget cuts. The study was done after President Obama’s Deficit Commission suggested in
Although midsize US banks do not need to follow the Basel II accord, some choose to. And as Hans Helbekkmo, Chief Risk Officer for San Francisco-based Union Bank, told guests at April’s SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, the decision to follow the Basel II requirements using a transparent, in-house approach
I hope that the following statement is not too controversial...but here it goes: Microsoft Excel is not a database system. That is, I know that people do use it as a database, but it's not an application that supports the rigor and discipline of managing data in the same way
In the health care field, the impact of fraud, waste and abuse on payers -- whether insurance companies, government agencies or self-insured employers -- is enormous. Fraud losses weaken a payer’s financial position, with fraud loss estimates rivaling net income. Fraud losses feed the escalating care cost curve, undermining a
SAS Enterprise Guide is best known as an interactive interface to SAS, but did you know that you can use it to run batch-style programs as well? SAS Enterprise Guide has always offered an automation object model, which allows you to use scripting languages (such as VBScript or Windows PowerShell)
The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD) of 2009 was triggered by the financial crisis and designed to protect subprime borrowers by forcing lenders to provide more transparency and more reasonable, fairer rates and fees to borrowers. This has proven a costly burden for US lenders as they
A major news item this week is the New York Department of Health's labeling of childen's games like Kickball, Wiffleball, Freeze Tag, Red Rover, and Steal the Bacon as dangerous. (Apparently Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare, and Doctor are still ok?) Is this the continuing wussification of American youth?
