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Policing has profoundly changed over the last several decades and its evolution will continue as long as there are crimes to commit and communities to serve. The very nature of policing is dynamic – it always has been and always will be. Those dynamics are driven by many things –
There is nothing the gambler, investor, forecaster, or Match.com dater likes as much as the sure thing. Don't we all? Back in April I stated what I claimed to be a sure thing forecast: In any group of 2 or more people, there is at least one pair of people
As organizations confront the limits of forecasting, they finally realize the folly in a blind pursuit of unachievable levels of forecast accuracy. The best accuracy we can ever hope to achieve is limited by the nature -- the forecastability -- of what we are trying to forecast. Anything better than
SAS Enterprise Guide has about 150 options that you can customize in the Tools->Options window. With each release, the development team adds a few more options that have been asked for by customers, and they rarely decommission any existing options. It's getting quite crowded on some of those options windows!
Have you ever wanted to look like George Clooney and get all the money, fame, and dates? I have long aspired to this. But in the great poker hand of life, I wasn't dealt an inside straight or even a nice pair. So I make do with what I've got.
As I write my first blog entry for SAS State and Local Government, I thought it would be prudent to provide a little personal background. I grew up in a family of artists- with 5 musicians, 2 painters, 1 sculptor, 1 dancer, and 1 composer. I studied business, became a
I hope that the following statement is not too controversial...but here it goes: Microsoft Excel is not a database system. That is, I know that people do use it as a database, but it's not an application that supports the rigor and discipline of managing data in the same way
It's a simple task to use SAS to compute the number of weekdays between two dates. You can use the INTCK function with the WEEKDAY interval to come up with that number. diff = intck('WEEKDAY', start_date, end_date); If you want to compute the number of working days between two dates,
The Spring 2011 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman's preview: For forecasters, “being wrong” is the expectation; the hope is that we’re not too wrong. But admitting to our failures is never easy. The Spring 2011 issue leads off with Marcus O’Connor’s book review of
SAS Enterprise Guide is best known as an interactive interface to SAS, but did you know that you can use it to run batch-style programs as well? SAS Enterprise Guide has always offered an automation object model, which allows you to use scripting languages (such as VBScript or Windows PowerShell)
The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD) of 2009 was triggered by the financial crisis and designed to protect subprime borrowers by forcing lenders to provide more transparency and more reasonable, fairer rates and fees to borrowers. This has proven a costly burden for US lenders as they
Congratulations to Curt Hinrichs and Chuck Boiler! Their book, JMP Essentials: An Illustrated Step-by-Step Guide for New Users, has won an Award of Distinguished Technical Communication in this year’s International Summit Awards presented by the Society for Technical Communication. The award goes to a project that “applies the principles of
The log transformation is one of the most useful transformations in data analysis. It is used as a transformation to normality and as a variance stabilizing transformation. A log transformation is often used as part of exploratory data analysis in order to visualize (and later model) data that ranges over
I've been walking around the last few days with what looks like a dollop of chocolate syrup or grape jelly on my chin. Alas, it is just a bruise from getting elbowed in the mouth at basketball last Thursday night. (Church leagues may be the only dirtier place to play
A major news item this week is the New York Department of Health's labeling of childen's games like Kickball, Wiffleball, Freeze Tag, Red Rover, and Steal the Bacon as dangerous. (Apparently Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare, and Doctor are still ok?) Is this the continuing wussification of American youth?