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Visualizing the distribution of data is a primary task of data analysis. With all the hurricane activity in the Atlantic this year, I’ve been thinking about ways to visualize the historical distribution of hurricane activity. USA Today on Friday, August 13, 2010, announced that "the heart of hurricane season is
Recently, SAS Global Forum announced the call for papers for the 2011 conference to be held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Since the conference is in Las Vegas, I’ve been thinking a lot about games of chance: blackjack, craps, roulette, and the like. You can analyze these games by
My colleague at SAS, @WaynetteTubbs, is editor of our technical e-newsletter and the Risk Management Knowledge Exchange. Waynette made a great point in this week’s SAS Tech Report that helps us move away from the echo chamber that is social media. We spend a lot of time talking to social
My mother taught me to put things away when I'm finished using them. She doesn't use a computer, but if she did, I know that she'd approve of this tip from my book: Tip: Always close your files and data sets when you are finished reading or writing them. In
Today is the birthday of Bernhard Riemann, a German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the fields of geometry, analysis, and number theory. Riemann is definitely on my list of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and his conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers is one of the great
Okay, I admit it, I'm old school. In my office, every good plan begins at the white-board. And the more complex the plan, the more colors are used. Today's whiteboard session was about the integration of Social Media in to one of our largest events, the Premier Business Leadership Series which
In my post yesterday about the 64-bit hype and how client apps like SAS Enterprise Guide would see only a limited boost from a 64-bit version, I forgot to point out another offering from SAS that has embraced the 64-bit architecture: JMP. JMP offers a 64-bit version, and it makes
Question: Is there a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide? Answer: SAS Enterprise Guide is a 32-bit application, even with its most recent release. As such, it is still completely supported on any 64-bit Windows machine, but it runs in the 32-bit subsystem (also known as WoW64 – short for
Missing values are a fact of life. Many statistical analyses, such as regression, exclude observations that contain missing values prior to forming matrix equations that are used in the analysis. This post shows how to find rows of a data matrix that contain missing values and how to remove those
Have you ever visited a city for the first time and, instead of relying maps to plan your journey, you simply plug your destinations into a GPS device and mindlessly follow the navigation directions? You've just cheated yourself out of a learning opportunity, because planning the journey and using your
How do marketers help to fight terrorism? Today I experienced one way...run a top-notch conference that allows private sector banks, law enforcement and regulatory agencies to come together and collaborate with an objective to stop Terrorism Financing. Just two days before the anniversary of the largest terrorist attack on US
Peter Flom reminded readers of his blog that you should always end a SAS procedure with a RUN statement. This is good rule. However, PROC IML is an exception to the rule. In PROC IML, the RUN statement is used to execute a built-in subroutine or a user-defined module. You
The shortfall in 2010 state and local government budgets is not news. But it remains the biggest issue facing state and local governments today – and will continue well into tomorrow. Existing gaps are projected to widen further in 2011, throwing departments and agencies already on the edge further into
No matter how much we want it, and no matter how hard we try, we can’t always achieve the forecast accuracy desired. Forecasting Heads or Tails in the toss of a fair coin gives the perfect illustration (being right 50% of the time is all we can achieve over a
A frequently performed task in data analysis is identifying all the observations in a data set that satisfy certain conditions. For example, you might want to identify all of the female patients in your study or to identify all patients whose systolic blood pressure is greater than 140 mm Hg.