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I feel the experience of participating at SAS Global Forum year after year is like relishing a warm brownie! It’s the same treat but a unique experience every time. Subtle changes in the ingredients can lead to a unique and enhanced flavor. The team behind the scenes works hard to
If you haven't signed up for SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas, you'd better get moving: February 28 is the last day for early registration and the discounted hotel prices. You should also sign up for the pre-conference statistical tutorials, which are filling up fast! I was tempted to
I was inspired by Chris Hemedinger's blog posts about his daughter's science fair project. Explaining statistics to a pre-teenager can be a humbling experience. My 11-year-old son likes science. He recently set about trying to measure which of three projectile launchers is the most accurate. I think he wanted to
I’m sure you will all agree that a programmer’s favorite task is to maximize efficiency thus enhancing performance. Dear reader, in this blog post I’ll share my best programming practices so that you can benefit from what I typically show my students in class. At the end I’d like to
I don't know much about the SQL procedure, but I know that it is powerful. According to the SAS documentation for the SQL procedure, "PROC SQL can perform some of the operations that are provided by the DATA step and the PRINT, SORT, and SUMMARY procedures." Recently, a fellow blogger,
If you are a statistical programmer, sooner or later you have to compute a confidence interval. In the SAS/IML language, some beginning programmers struggle with forming a confidence interval. I don't mean that they struggle with the statistics (they know how to compute the relevant quantities), I mean that they
The Flowing Data blog posted some data about how much TV actors get paid per episode. About a dozen folks have created various visualizations of the data (see the comments in the Flowing Data blog), several of them very glitzy and fancy. One variable in the data is a categorical
I've known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I've observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife's grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean aluminum foil for potential reuse in the household -- because such materials were once scarce. The
Suppose that you want to create a matrix in SAS/IML software that has a special structure, such as a tridiagonal matrix. How do you do it? Or suppose that you want to find elements of a matrix A such that A[i,j] satisfies a certain condition. How do you get the
Brian Whittington mentioned last month that government is innovating, and at great speed. Based on what I’ve seen in our line of work with state and local governments around the country in the past year, I have to agree. In the face of today’s daunting fiscal challenges, state and local
If you tell my wife that she's married to a statistical geek, she'll nod knowingly. She is used to hearing sweet words of affection such as You are more beautiful than Euler's identity. or My love for you is like the exponential function: increasing, unbounded, and transcendental. But those are
In a previous blog post, I described the rules for a tic-tac-toe scratch-off lottery game and showed that it is a bad idea to generate the game tickets by using a scheme that uses equal probabilities. Instead, cells that yield large cash awards must be assigned a small probability of
Because of this week's story about a geostatistician, Mohan Srivastava, who figured out how predict winning tickets in a scratch-off lottery, I've been thinking about scratch-off games. He discovered how to predict winners when he began to "wonder how they make these [games]." Each ticket has a set of "lucky
I enjoyed the Dataists' data-driven blog on the best numbers to choose in a Super Bowl betting pool. It reminded me of my recent investigation of which initials are most common. Because the Dataists' blog featured an R function that converts Arabic numerals into Roman numerals, the blog post also
The other day, someone asked me how to compute a matrix of pairwise differences for a vector of values. The person asking the question was using SQL to do the computation for 2,000 data points, and it was taking many hours to compute the pairwise differences. He asked if SAS/IML