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A colleague related the following story: He was taking notes at a meeting that was attended by a fairly large group of people (about 20). As each person made a comment or presented information, he recorded the two-letter initials of the person who spoke. After the meeting was over, he
Last December I taught a SAS Programming 1: Essentials class at Statistics Canada (Statcan). My class could barely contain their mirth while I valiantly struggled to find the semicolon on the French keyboard. Far cry from my first move to Canada (which is a bilingual country) and my excitement about
SAS/IML software is often used for sampling and simulation studies. For simulating data from univariate distributions, the RANDSEED and RANDGEN subroutines suffice to sample from a wide range of distributions. (I use the terms "sampling from a distribution" and "simulating data from a distribution" interchangeably.) For multivariate simulations, the IMLMLIB
If I think back to the training, education and networking opportunities in my business intelligence and analytics career that have made the most difference, SAS user groups (SUG) stand out. As a new user to SAS many moons ago local, regional and international groups helped me develop skills that I
AUTOEXEC.SAS wasn't enough for you. Yes, it's a sure-fire way to run SAS statements (such as LIBNAME assignments or macro definitions) whenever you start your SAS session, but you found it has limitations when used in configurations with lots of users who connect with SAS Enterprise Guide. Limitations such as:
It is often useful to create a vector with elements that follow an arithmetic sequence. For example, {1, 2, 3, 4} and {10, 30, 50, 70} are vectors with evenly spaced values. This post describes several ways to create vectors such as these. The SAS/IML language has two ways to
Computing probabilities can be tricky. And if you are a statistician and you get them wrong, you feel pretty foolish. That's why I like to run a quick simulation just to make sure that the numbers that I think are correct are, in fact, correct. My last post of 2010
Appetizers usually play a significant role in ensuring a good restaurant experience…right? A good appetizer whets your appetite and gets you psyched and excited for the main course! This series of blog posts aims to do just that…whet your appetite for what’s in store at SAS Global Forum. In the
Happy New Year to everyone! As we gear up to start 2011, I thought I would share a holiday story about Apple’s tablet device - the iPad! When it first appeared on the market last April, critics derided the device as being an Apple gimmick – it was, after all,
The Junk Chart blog discusses problems with a chart which (poorly) presents statistics on the prevalence of shark attacks by different species. Here is the same data presented by overlaying two bar charts by using the SGPLOT procedure. I think this approach works well because the number of deaths is
If I say, social media analytics, and you say, What's that? I have some good links for you. First, you'll want to read this interview with Katie Paine, where she explains, among other things, the difference between social monitoring ,social measurement and social analytics. "Social analytics is where measurement and
Over at the SAS/IML Discussion Forum, someone posted an interesting question about how to create a special matrix that contains all combinations of zeros and ones for a given size. Specifically, the problem is as follows. Given an integer n ≥ 1, produce a matrix with 2n rows and n
Most people don’t think about government when they hear the word “innovation”, but it’s happening, and has been since long before “The Great Recession.” However, the current economic conditions have certainly moved things along. Government responds very similarly to private industry when faced with challenges. SAS manages to do relatively
I have a confession: I am not very good at math. I know that will come as a terrible surprise and disappointment to some of you. You may even be astonished that SAS would hire someone who doesn't have a PhD in statistics. But math is not the only skill
Happy New Year!! This is a good time to think about what was going on here in SAS Education one year ago, and to introduce you to a big project that I'm really excited to "take public." In January 2010 (as well as throughout 2009), we kept getting cries for