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In our hyper-connected world, information technology plays a key role in nearly every field and industry. Higher education is no exception, and that’s where EDUCAUSE comes in. This non-profit association works to advance higher education through the use of information technology. One of the primary ways EDUCAUSE achieves its goal

Super foods have been all the rage for the past few years. We’ve all heard about certain super foods that are darlings in the media like kale, blueberries, acai berries and salmon to name a few. What about other super foods that maybe aren’t so sexy like sardines, organ meats,

The Spring 2014 issue of Foresight includes Steve Morlidge's latest article on the topic of forecastability and forecasting performance. He reports on sample data obtained from eight business operating in consumer (B2C) and industrial (B2B) markets. Before we look at these new results, let's review his previous arguments: 1. All

Solving the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 hinges on the finding the plane's black boxes, or flight data and cockpit voice recorder. An airplane’s black box is something we hope never has to be used, but when there’s a problem, we sure are glad that it’s there. The black

As I was doing my taxes, I wondered where the government is spending my tax dollars. And being a SAS user, I decided to find out using a graph ... I did a few Google searches on "tax graphs" and found one on the CNN web site that I liked - it

The call for papers is open for all 2014 US regional users conferences. A few deadlines are just around the corner, and you won’t want to miss them! WUSS 2014 – May 5 SESUG 2014 — May 19 MWSUG 2014 — June 13 SCSUG 2014 — June 30 Spring is a difficult time

I’ve been to a fair number of SAS User Group International (SUGI) and SAS Global Forum conferences over the years, but I don’t think I’ve been to one as productive, well-organized and fun as this year’s conference in Washington DC. Part of what made the conference very relevant for many

Analytics gives us not just the ability but the imperative to separate our planning activities into two distinct segments – detailed planning that leads to budgets in support of execution, and high-level, analytic-enabled business/scenario planning. My critique of Control Towers in this blog last time led me not only to

Principle 3: Accuracy and Integrity – A bank should be able to generate accurate and reliable risk data to meet normal and stress/crisis reporting accuracy requirements. Data should be aggregated on a largely automated basis so as to minimize the probability of errors. It seems logical that banks would want

I have previously written about the scope of local and global variables in the SAS/IML language. You might wonder whether SAS/IML modules can also have local scope. The answer is no. All SAS/IML modules are known globally and can be called by any other modules. Some object-oriented programming languages support
Often, the topic of an article is motivated by a question from a user. A satisfactory resolution of the situation is usually a good indication of a topic that may be of interest to other users. On such question was posed to me by a user this weekend. He wanted to display fit

Some very common questions we receive into Technical Support are, “I need to be able to send the data for every hospital listed in my data set to a separate .csv file. How can I do that?” Or, “How can I run a PROC REPORT for each region listed in

Here is editor Len Tashman's preview of the new Spring 2014 issue of Foresight. In particular note the new article by Steve Morlidge of CatchBull, reporting on an analysis of eight B2B and B2C companies, which we'll discuss in a separate post. An organization’s collaboration in forecasting and planning has

When you run a program or task in SAS Enterprise Guide, the application wraps your job in an "ODS sandwich", the colloquial term we use for the ODS statements necessary to create output that can be viewed in your project. That's convenient for exploring and refining your program, but at

Recently, as I was driving in listening to National Public Radio (NPR), the topic of conversation was Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency (NSA), again. If you’ve been listening to any of this coverage, it seems the news media has a new catch word “metadata” that they are throwing