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In the latest news from the frontier of Internet technology, the NY Times presented an interesting article about the work that high tech providers are doing to ensure maximum system availability. Companies strive for the "5 nines," or 99.999% availability, although a more realistic number is a "4 nine," or
"What is the chance that two people in a room of 20 share initials?" This was the question posed to me by a colleague who had been taking notes at a meeting with 20 people. He recorded each person's initials next to their comments and, upon editing the notes, was
As you’re making your New Year’s Resolutions or reconsidering some that you’ve already put on the list, be sure to think about including SAS Press. Here are our Top 10 Suggestions: Check out the latest SAS Press books. In 2010, we published 20 books. In 2011, we’re on schedule to
A colleague posted some data on his internal SAS blog about key trends in the US Mobile phone industry, as reported by comScore. He graciously shared the data so that I could create a graph that visualizes the trends. The plot visualizes trends in the data: the Android phone is
I think being greedy is a virtue – especially when you are trying to feed your intellectual curiosity! You can satiate that hunger at SAS Global Forum, which offers an unlimited buffet of thought-provoking ideas and discussions. To give you a glimpse of what to expect at Las Vegas this
When your data are in rows, but you need them in columns, use the matrix transpose function or operator. The same advice applies to data in columns that you want to be in rows. For example, the vectors created by the DO function and the index creation operator are row
Interesting article in this quarters sascom magazine by Jeff Ma – the guy behind “bringing down the house” and the movie “21”. After explaining how he felt the power of analytics and statistics was not unlike believing in God, he shared 2 stories where that faith was put to the
One of the best things about writing for the sascom blog is the amazing number of people, both internally and externally, that have reached out to share their stories and perspective, and ask more questions. It’s important for us bloggers to remember that while we may not see published comments
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