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We had a tornado in April, an earthquake on Tuesday, a drought all summer, and a hurricane arrives on Saturday. All I can figure is that Cary, NC has way too many sinners per capita. What's next -- pestilence? The BFD Makeover The BFD (and all SAS blogs) will now be
The recent budget debate between President Obama and Congress reminded me of many of the discussions I observed during my years as State Controller and Deputy State Budget Officer in North Carolina. These discussions are related specifically to principles adhered to in budget development and budget deliberations by elected officials.
You can generate a set of random numbers in SAS that are uniformly distributed by using the RAND function in the DATA step or by using the RANDGEN subroutine in SAS/IML software. (These same functions also generate random numbers from other common distributions such as binomial and normal.) The syntax
The highway system traversing the United States quietly hit a milestone last month with the 55th anniversary of the Federal Aid Highway Act. In 1956 President Eisenhower had a vision for our nation’s infrastructure; he knew that building an interstate highway system was vital, and expressed that “Together, the united
The new, third edition of Frederick Pratter’s Web Development with SAS by Example recently came out to great fanfare. Updated for SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise BI Server 4.3, Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition, introduces readers to Web programming using real-world examples and SAS Web programming tools. So
This is your chance to be a part of what has made SAS Global Forum a focal point of innovation in the SAS community for more than three decades. Now through November 14, paper submissions are being considered in the technology and industry solutions tracks. It’s time to write up
This week’s featured SAS author’s tip comes from SAS user extraordinaire Ron Cody. Honestly, because Ron has written so many SAS books, I could probably feature a year’s worth of tips from his work alone. To find something useful in any of Ron’s books, one merely needs to let the
I bet that many of you reading our blog are familiar with accomplished SAS users and authors Lauren Haworth, Cynthia Zender, and Michele Burlew. Together, they form a powerful triumvirate of SAS experience. If you get a chance to pick up their book Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond
One of the great innovations with SAS 9.3 is the focus on ODS statistical graphics. "Wait a minute," you're thinking, "weren't ODS graphics added in SAS 9.2?" Yes, that's true. But with SAS 9.3 there is even more capability: more analytical SAS procedures support the graphs, and there are more
Tuesday's release of SAS 9.3 included the new SAS Forecast Server 4.1, which has several valuable enhancements: Combination (Ensemble) Models: A combination of forecasts using different forecasting techniques can outperform forecasts produced by using any single technique. Users can combine forecasts produced by many different models using several different combination
Most of us grew up playing some type of sport and dreaming of becoming a collegiate or professional athlete. For me, it was a focus on dance and striving to be a professional ballerina. At some point we realized that in order to make this dream a reality, we’d have
It seems like such a simple problem: how can you reliably compute the age of someone or something? Susan lamented the subtle issues using the YRDIF function exactly 1.0356164384 years ago. Sure, you could write your own function for calculating such things, as I suggested 0.1753424658 years ago. Or you
SAS Enterprise Guide sets values for several useful SAS macro variables when it connects to a SAS session, including one macro variable, &_CLIENTPROJECTPATH, that contains the name and path of the current SAS Enterprise Guide project file. (To learn about this and other macro variables that SAS Enterprise Guide assigns,
As I write this, SAS 9.3 has not yet been "shipped", but its release is imminent. I've already heard many questions about how SAS Enterprise Guide works with the new version, so I decided to write this "Frequently-soon-to-be-asked questions" document to help sort it out. What version of SAS Enterprise
The recent issue of InformationWeek features a Q&A session with Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the Unix operating system. (He collaborated with Dennis Ritchie, of C language fame. Since much of SAS is written in C, I daresay there are a few copies of K&R around here.) One