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Did I tell you that I went to Andrew Kuligowski's hands-on workshop while I was at MWSUG 2012? Actually, I only attended the first portion of his session; it didn't make sense for me to take up a computer since I'm not a programmer. His workshop was to teach users how to parse useful data from unusual
It takes just one-tenth of a second for us to make a first impression. And if that initial sizing up is followed by the classic icebreaker “What do you do?” the pressure is really on to keep someone engaged in conversation. What do you do? will come up countless times
This week's SAS tip is from Barry de Ville and his book Decision Trees for Business Intelligence and Data Mining: Using SAS Enterprise Miner. Barry is a technical and analytical consultant at SAS. To learn more about Barry and his forthcoming new edition of the book, following this week's excerpt, visit his author
IBM Global Financing offers 100 percent financing on your SAS purchase In this economy, many companies are counting their pennies. Those budget constraints can put a real damper on requests for the SAS products and solutions that you need for your data challenges. IBM Global Finance (IGF) – the world's
There are people who claim that an IT expert professional with no knowledge of SAS can get the SAS Administrator job done. That's probably true. It also depends on your definition of getting the job done. At some SAS sites, it can be that the administrator's role in supporting SAS is to install it and
The other day I was constructing covariance matrices for simulating data for a mixed model with repeated measurements. I was using the SAS/IML BLOCK function to build up the "R-side" covariance matrix from smaller blocks. The matrix I was constructing was block-diagonal and looked like this: The matrix represents a
Disasters like Hurricane Sandy, by and large, shine a positive light on humanity, with the heroic actions of first responders and volunteers, and the massive outpouring of support from across the nation. They also present fraud opportunities for the shady operators and criminals among us. Hurricanes leave behind a lot
In case you are wondering, yes, I am reusing the same graphic from last week, but this time to make a contrasting point. Last time, in “The Skeptical CFO” I was focused on the VARIABILITY in the data and the forecast. This week, however, we’re headed in the opposite direction,
In the U.S. we have a presidential election every 4 years - and as luck would have it, 2012 is an election year! I see a lot of election maps & graphs in the news, and I'm always subconsciously critiquing them in my mind and thinking to myself, "How would I graph this
OK all you mamas and papas, and SAS users who aren’t. It’s time to turn your SAS Global Forum dreams into a reality. Registration for the 2013 event is now open. The event promises to offer no time for “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” with an anticipated 400
Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid's small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my "digital pack-rat" issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a project I worked 3 years
The North East SAS Users Group Conference (NESUG) will be held November 11-14, in Baltimore, Maryland. I’m psyched to be attending this year, and hope I’ll see you there.
In the previous post on Violin Plots, we discussed the process to create custom density plots. This work was done in collaboration with SAS user James Marcus. This is the second installment on the same topic - Creating Density Strip Plots. We will use the same data and process to compute
We all have some sort of intuitive idea of what time series data is – it’s a bunch of measurements or observations that are marked by a time stamp – we know when the measurement was taken, as well as what was measured. This natural temporal ordering of the data
This week's SAS tip is from Ron Cody and his book Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS, Second Edition. Ron is the popular author of several bestselling SAS books and has been a SAS user since 1977. Visit Ron's author page for lots of bonus content, including a free chapter from his