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Today is American Diabetes Association Alert Day®: a one-day "wake-up call" to bring attention to the increasing prevalence of diabetes worldwide. Whether or not you have diabetes, today is a perfect time to step back and think about your current lifestyle and what you can do NOW to prevent or
I enjoy human kids. When I’m not working, they’re a lot of fun to be around. Recently, Ed had a speaking engagement with some local students who are visually impaired. They were competing in a contest known as the Braille Challenge, sponsored by the national Braille Institute. And, wow, these

In December, Kathy Council gave us the scoop on the consolidation of several divisions at SAS into a single organization focused on customer support. At this morning’s 2014 Technology Connection, Fritz Lehman, Vice President of SAS Customer Engagement and Support, shared his vision by responding to some of your requests

In my region of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) one of the most anticipated times of the year has arrived— the NCAA basketball tournament. This is a great time of year for me, because I get to combine several of my passions. For those who don’t live among crazed college

With all the recent news reports about the missing Flight 370, I wondered what other airplanes have disappeared without a trace ... and I used SAS to visualize that data! There was in interesting infographic on the Bloomberg website that sort of answered my question, but their map just had

Fast jede zweite Flasche Wein wird in Deutschland beim Discounter gekauft, meldete gestern das Handelsblatt. Das sollte ein fulminantes Warnsignal für den Weinfachhandel und die Winzer mit Direktvermarktung sein! Discounter haben in den letzten Jahren ihr Sortiment stetig verfeinert - gerade durch hochwertigere Angebote, die sogar unter ausgemachten Weinkennern geschätzt werden.

Are retailers suffering a skills shortage when it comes to analytics? Nikki Baird from Retail Systems Research (RSR Group) offers some intriguing observations about the critical analytical talent shortage facing the retail industry in a recent article, “Where Have All the Data Scientists Gone? SAS Analyst Day Report Out.” Her observations

Yesterday, I was on a phone call with a disappointed SAS user who won't be attending SAS Global Forum 2014. Like many others, her organization is facing another year of reduced travel and conference budgets. While there's no substitute for attending in person, live webcasts from SAS Global Forum make

SAS administrators have a delicate balance to maintain. SAS users want to be happy and productive, and to be granted the freedom to use any techniques in their skill set to accomplish their work. But the Business (or Government or Research institution) wants their sensitive data to be protected, and

Last month I blogged about defining SAS/IML functions that have default parameter values. This language feature, which was introduced in SAS/IML 12.1, enables you to skip arguments when you call a user-defined function. The same technique enables you to define optional parameters. Inside the function, you can determine whether the

Learning. Sharing knowledge. Catching up with colleagues. My favorite part of attending SAS Global Forum is connecting with other SAS users from around the globe. SAS Global Forum 2014 is run for SAS users, by SAS users and all of the content presented at the event is from users like
The SAS Global Forum 2014 is just around the corner starting Sunday, March 23 and I am eager to attend creative presentations from SAS users on ODS Graphics. Adoption of SG procedures, GTL and ODS Graphics Designer is growing among users and I see many promising papers. Papers by users: Something for Nothing!

After decades of trying to "manage" and "control" quality, manufacturers continue to struggle with consistently achieving quality excellence. To conquer the realities of today's marketplace and achieve quality excellence, manufacturers need to adopt an analytic approach to quality. The basic objective of manufacturers hasn't changed since the beginning - produce

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and classrooms all over the US are decorated with shamrocks and the green top hats of the mythical leprechaun. According to legend, if you ever catch one, the leprechaun has the magical power to grant three wishes in exchange for its release (not to mention

The SAS/IML language has several functions for finding the unions, intersections, and differences between sets. In fact, two of my favorite utility functions are the UNIQUE function, which returns the unique elements in a matrix, and the SETDIF function, which returns the elements that are in one vector and not