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Attending DMA 2010? We’d love to have you as our guest at one or more of our three presentations, or at our book signing and networking event with Chris Brogan. Here are the details. Explore better ways to connect with customers in these presentations: First, we will present Enhance Consumer
Since its 4.2 release, SAS Enterprise Guide has been able to import Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 spreadsheet files (usually encountered as .XLSX files). But while SAS Enterprise Guide can export XLS files (which are compatible with all versions of Microsoft Excel), it does not have the ability to export
In a previous blog post about hurricanes, I created a histogram of the occurrence of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin during the years 1988–2003. That histogram shows that the peak of hurricane activity occurs in the second week of September, but also that a majority of tropical storms occur
In this segment of “The Nuts & Bolts of Social Media,” Kirsten Hamstra outlines the details of how SAS Publishing planned and executed its social media strategy. SAS Publishing was the first SAS division out on Social Media and they achieved good early success through planning, and are able to
This morning I read an interesting post about the design of the new Twitter Web page. The post included some R code to generate the ratio between adjacent terms in the Fibonacci seqence. The ratio converges to the "Golden Ratio": 1.61803399.... I'm sure that many R gurus will post simpler
I saw a suggestion arrive from a SAS customer who would like to see the IN operator extended to allow ranges of date values. For example, you can currently write a program that checks for values IN a collection or range of numbers: data check; if x in (1:10) then
Next week, I'll be part of a blogging panel at the Ragan conference, "The Role of Communications in Creating Best Places to Work." I'm on the panel with colleagues David Biesack, Chris Hemedinger and Becky Graebe, and we'll primarily be talking about our internal blog program on the SAS intranet,
The SAS/IML language is a vector language, so statements that operate on a few long vectors run much faster than equivalent statements that involve many scalar quantities. For example, in a previous post, I asserted that the LOC function is much faster than writing a loop, for finding observations that
AnnMaria wrote her latest blog post, "SAS Enterprise Guide makes you smarter", partly in response to my recent post about whether it's making you stupider. From the contents of her program example, I'm guessing that she's preparing for WUSS in November. I don't get to attend this year, but my
The Junk Chart blog discusses a potential problem that can arise in grouped bar charts when the two groups have vastly different ranges. One possible solution (which is discussed at the Junk Chart sister blog, Numbers Rule Your World) is to present the data back-back in what is sometimes called
Today, financial services organizations are swamped in data because of regulatory requirements, years of rapid growth, mergers and acquisitions, and Internet-accessible data. This flood has many firms struggling with disparate sources and varying degrees of data quality. There are several reasons your organization might choose to integrate its data, including,
We have all heard the old axiom that all politics are local. Recently, I have been in discussions about international responses to major disasters, Specifically, the floods in Pakistan, Haitian earthquake and Indonesia tsunami of 2004. In each of those cases, there were massive international responses to the crisis. Numerous
For the first time this year, our M2010 Data Mining Conference marketing team decided to give Facebook advertising a try. I ran a split test, to test the criteria used to identify the reach (keywords versus SAS connections). At the end of the week, my ads had received 517 clicks
The SAS/IML run-time library contains hundreds of functions and subroutines that you can call to perform statistical analysis. There are also many functions in Base SAS software that you can call from SAS/IML programs. However, one day you might need to compute some quantity for which there is no prewritten
As a kid growing up on the farm, I knew the difference between good quality tools and cheap imitations. Farm equipment was very unforgiving to tools, so the cheap imitations wouldn’t last long. Fast-forward to being an adult living in a suburb of Minneapolis, and I quickly became a fan