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In our SAS Hartford regional office, there is an annual tradition – the holiday breakfast. This will be my first breakfast with my office mates and I’m looking forward to the famous conference room waffles cooked up by a certain insurance account executive. Thinking about those waffles reminded me of
In a number of posts over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing ideas for becoming an analytically driven insurance company. We’ve talked about information strategies, user enablement, collaboration, and now we’re going to talk about growing pains. We recently met with an insurer for a discussion around their
When I wake up early to write my blog, I often wonder, "Is anyone going to read this?" Apparently so. I started writing The DO Loop in September, 2010. Since then, I've posted about 60 entries about statistical programming with SAS/IML software. Since this is a statistical blog, it is
You might be too young to remember Clara Peller. She was the star of a series of fast-food burger commercials in the 1980s, in which she demanded meatier meals by shouting "Where's the beef?" at the pickup counter or drive-through window. Alas, the competitor restaurant meals were afflicted with "Fluffy
Recently I was listening to an NPR (National Public Radio) documentary about the history of cancer and medicine’s evolution in understanding and treating cancer. This was an amazing story. I would venture a guess that nearly everyone who is reading this post has been affected by cancer in one way
This year, SAS joined the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud (CAIF). Not long ago I had a chance to attend my first CAIF meeting and I was very impressed with what I saw and heard. Fraud continues to be a thorn in the side of the insurance industry. The most recent
When I joined SAS Institute I had no knowledge of SAS. I studied, researched and practiced. The questions I asked would make even the most seasoned programmer blush a beetroot red! Those were an intense nine months—I’ll tell you more in a later post about the learning system at SAS
When I finished writing my book, Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I was elated. However, one small task still remained. I had to write the index. How Long Should an Index Be? My editor told me that SAS Press would send the manuscript to a professional editor who would index
Dear SAS Users - As I write this last post for 2010, I have one ear listening to the weather forecast for signs that we should pull out the sleds and snow boots. MAYBE we’ll get a little snow in the next few days to make it really seem like
Paula Joshi wrote last month about how what we learn from the commercial world can be applied in government. She also promised to post a few examples. I’ll get that ball rolling. This week SAS announced the availability of SAS Enterprise Case Management. While the announcement focuses more on the
Recently, I needed to detect whether a matrix consists entirely of missing values. I wrote the following module: proc iml; /** Module to detect whether all elements of a matrix are missing values. Works for both numeric and character matrices. Version 1 (not optimal) **/ start isMissing(x); if type(x)='C' then
As I mentioned in an earlier post, having an information strategy and analytic goals tied to key business objectives are critical components of being able to competitively leverage your analytic assets and capabilities. In general, in the insurance industry vertical I support, we don’t see many organizations that have a
NOTE: SAS stopped shipping the SAS/IML Studio interface in 2018. The references in this article to IMLPlus and SAS/IML Studio are no longer relevant. There are three kinds of programming errors: parse-time errors, run-time errors, and logical errors. It doesn't matter what language you are using (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, C/C++,
I helped to write a quiz for the Computer Science Education Week promotions that were featured on our company intranet. Do you fancy yourself as a Comp-Sci aficionado? Let's see how you do with these. 1. Which achievement is Charles Babbage most famous for? A. Establishing software retail shops in
Last week, several of the faculty members of the International Institute for Analytics (IIA) —Tom Davenport, Jeanne Harris, James Taylor, John Elder, Bill Franks, Niel Nickolaisen, Jeremy Shapiro and I—offered some predictions for analytics in the coming year. You can hear an audio recording of the discussion or read a