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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
It's a New Year and I'm ready to make some resolutions. Last year I launched this blog with my Hello, World post in which I said: In this blog I intend to discuss, describe, and disseminate ideas related to statistical programming with the SAS/IML language.... I will present tips and
In many families, siblings draw names so that each family member and spouse gives and receives exactly one present. This year there was a little bit of controversy when a family member noticed that once again she was assigned to give presents to me. This post includes my response to
The term "analytics" has become so overused that I'm not sure anyone really knows what it means anymore - or at the very least, it means a lot of different things to different people. Sometimes analytics gets blended in with "business analytics" which gets blended in with "business intelligence." What
If outliers could scream, would we be so cavalier about removing them from our history, and excluding them from our statistical forecasting models? Well, maybe we would – if they screamed all the time, and for no good reason. (This sentiment is adapted from my favorite of the many Deep
A few days ago, I wrote a post on the "soul" of analytics - basically the careful balance we need to keep between qualitative and quantitative decision-making. I asked others to post their experiences and perspective, and I was fortunate enough to begin a "dia-blog" with Colonel Jim Markley, Director
Many years ago I served as the program manager for the NC Alternative Fuel Vehicles program. The goal of the program was to promote the usage of various vehicle types that were alternatives to gasoline powered vehicles. One of the main programs in this set of grants was the Clean
A customer phoned up SAS Technical Support the other day with a problem. (Yes, that happens occasionally...) When he ran a certain program through SAS Enterprise Guide, the program didn't seem to complete and no results were returned. Here is a snippet of the program (modified a bit to make