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SAS programming is taught in schools all over the world, including in high schools. Occasionally, I receive questions via my blog such as this one: Can somebody help me on this? Write a short DATA _NULL_ step to determine the largest integer you can store on your computer in 3,
Student’s schedules are packed with activities these days but taking time out to attend a conference is always a great addition to any semester. For students who use SAS and want to attend a SAS Users Group conference, here are some tips to help you get the most out of
In 2009, SAFETEA-LU—the legislation that outlines federal transportation funding for the states—expired. Since then, members of Congress have been kicking the can down the road, passing funding extensions instead of passing legislation. The major impact of this failure to act is that the U.S. continues to slip further and further
Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household -- a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the
The other day I encountered a SAS Knowledge Base article that shows how to count the number of missing and nonmissing values for each variable in a data set. However, the code is a complicated macro that is difficult for a beginning SAS programmer to understand. (Well, it was hard
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
Metadata is data about data. For the purposes of his NESUG 2011 presentation, Frank DiIorio defined metadata more precisely as data about data and data that describes workflow objects and processes. DiIorio wrote his paper because organizations are challenged more and more today to do more with less. Metadata can
As I mentioned in my introductory post about Windows PowerShell, you can use PowerShell commands as a simple and concise method to collect data from your Windows systems -- information that is ripe for analysis within SAS. In this example, I'll show a technique for using a SAS program to
Kathleen Harkins, Carolyn Maass and Mary Anne Rutkowski, from Merck Sharp and Dohme, collaborated to write T.I.P.S: Techniques and information for programming in SAS® for NESUG 2011. These three women are highly experienced programmers: Harkins has more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and aerospace industries; Maass has
The downturn in the economy beginning in 2008 and continuing even to now has put tremendous pressure on local governments to do “less with less”. In the past when economic downturns caused service level cut backs the cry was to do “more with less”. The idea was to identify ways
I use Google Reader to keep up with SAS-related conversations on the blogosphere. I thought it would be nice to share the lists of blogs that I follow as "shared bundles". If you also use Google Reader, it will be very easy for you to add these bundles to
‘Context’ defined (as cited from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary): 1: the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning; and, 2: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs: environment, setting. While context is clearly important, today it is consistently
Looping is essential to statistical programming. Whether you need to iterate over parameters in an algorithm or indices in an array, a loop is often one of the first programming constructs that a beginning programmer learns. Today is the first anniversary of this blog, which is named The DO Loop,
It's been a well-known limitation for a long time. When you connect to a SAS session using SAS Enterprise Guide, shell commands (including X command, SYSTASK, and FILENAME PIPE) are off-limits because the default SAS invocation disables them. It does this by including -NOXCMD as a command-line option. This makes
Hurricane Irene impacted 20% of the US population and will cost billions in recovery dollars. Now that the water has begun to subside, the real long term work begins. And it is this work that can be another disaster, or, a real economic benefit to a state. How so? FEMA