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I’m not a seasoned business traveler so I generally plan to arrive extra early and leave a little late to avoid any last-minute stress. The problem with all that stress-avoidance is that I often have extra time on my hands and am stuck with finding ways to entertain myself. What

"You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error." ~ Tim Harford TED Talk link: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford Karl Marx died thinking that the first communist revolution would occur in Great Britain, driven by the long hours and unsafe

Sports provide us with many familiar clichés about playing defense, such as: Defense wins championships. The best defense is a good offense. Or my favorite: The best defense is the one that ranks first statistically in overall defensive performance, after controlling for the quality of the offenses it has faced. Perhaps not

After the legalization of recreational marijuana use in Colorado in 2012, it has been a much more frequent news topic than before - even from a data analysis perspective... I was recently looking for 'interesting' data to analyze with SAS, and I noticed some articles about the increasing potency of marijuana in

SAS procedures usually handle missing values automatically. Univariate procedures such as PROC MEANS automatically delete missing values when computing basic descriptive statistics. Many multivariate procedures such as PROC REG delete an entire observation if any variable in the analysis has a missing value. This is called listwise deletion or using

Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1979, after an extensive vaccination campaign in the 19th and 20th centuries. This blog post contains a visual analysis of the final years of this disease in the US ... In my previous blog post, I imitated and improved infectious disease graphs from a recent Wall

It's that time of year: Awards season. While we on the SAS Social Media Team will be happily following along this Sunday for the 87th Annual Academy Awards (via Twitter, naturally), we thought it only appropriate to use this as a time to celebrate our customers in social from 2014. From

Many states are starting to crack down on the serious abuses of government programs, cutting down on outright fraud as well as reducing abuses and errors. I wanted to highlight one of those, now that they've been on this path for a few years. North Carolina, where SAS is headquartered,

As the point person for SAS joining the new Open Data Platform (ODP) initiative, I want to make it clear why SAS is involved with ODP, and why we think it’s important to our customers, and the Hadoop and big data ecosystem as a whole. SAS is not in it to
Hadoop is increasingly being adopted as the go-to platform for large-scale data analytics. However, it is still not necessarily clear that Hadoop is always the optimal choice for traditional data warehousing for reporting and analysis, especially in its “out of the box” configuration. That is because Hadoop itself is not

The Institute of Business Forecasting's FVA blog series continued in January, with my interview of Shaun Snapp, founder and editor of SCM Focus. Some of Shaun's answers surprised me, for example, that he doesn't compare performance to a naïve model (which I see as the most fundamental FVA comparison). But he went

How many of us have heard or even said the phrase, "If it's not broke, don't fix it." While on rare occasions this may be the correct approach, it is a statement that stops innovation and creativity in its tracks. You might as well say, "Because we've always done it that

Another Valentine's Day has passed. I often wonder where the time goes. It seems like yesterday my daughter was buying those little cards and sharing cut out hearts with her peers. Now, she's 15 and this year she had fun in a different way and I was happy to be

La analítica de negocios se ha convertido en la solución ideal para empresas de los diversos sectores económicos, sin embargo, ha llegado el momento de que los países se apropien y lleven a cabo nuevos planes de profundización, especialización y educación en este campo. Ya no basta con saber que

Many larger SAS deployments have multiple instances of similar SAS-related servers. For example, a distributed SAS Enterprise BI environment may have several machines running instances of the object spawner or the OLAP server. Similarly, all of your distributed SAS Visual Analytics deployments have worker nodes that are typically dedicated Linux