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As I make my way around the country I often have the opportunity to talk with state and local government leaders and as you can imagine, the financial crisis is the first, second and third topics on their minds. Everywhere, state and local governments are forced with painful decisions to
I presented recently at the County Auditors Association of California annual conference. It was a packed house in Death Valley, CA, and after weathering a major sandstorm, the attendees seemed anxious to learn of the latest fraud trends in local government. Based on the questions and sidebar discussions throughout the
This is the second entry in my series interpreting what it means for Chief Marketing Officers to become analytical marketers. Part 1 in the series, which covered planning, can be found here. This post describes phase two, the project kick-off. I'll start by listing phase two objects, and then provide
The Results Driven Policing Conference, which was put on by the Penn State University Justice and Safety Institute and held in Baltimore recently, showcased the great performance improvements achieved by forward thinking law enforcement agencies throughout the United State and Canada. These agencies are under increasing pressure to improve public
Like any good SAS professional, I subscribe to the SAS Samples RSS feed. The other day I found this sample that shows how to create a PDF report about the contents of a SAS Information Map. It's a nice example: it shows how to use the INFOMAPS engine and ODS
If you are a SAS/GRAPH user, you may have heard about the new Statistical Graphics ("SG") procedures that are new in SAS 9.2. These procedures are designed to make it easier to produce common statistical charts and plots. You may have assumed that the procedures are only for folks who
The motto of SAS’ home state gets at what I hope will be a recurring theme of State and Local Connections. How can state and local governments differentiate between what seems to be and what is? How can they move beyond intuition and gut feelings to know the truth? It
As Shane reveals on his blog, your SAS session is equipped to read data that are encoded for all types of machine architectures and locales. ASCII, EBCDIC, 32- or 64-bit, English, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew: the list goes on and on. SAS accomplishes this by using a feature called Cross-Environment Data
While reading a datadoodle blog post, Self tracking is business intelligence, I was taken back to my days in the advertising and PR agency world. The blog references Peter Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive that suggests tracking your day (or having your secretary do it) in increments of 15 minutes
It is that time of the year again! Rexer Analytics, a data mining consulting firm, is conducting their fourth annual data mining survey. The survey collects preferences, views and interests of data mining professionals (e.g. data miners, statisticians, modelers, analysts, etc.). SAS is not the sponsor of the survey. The
Why does this SAS program produce an error? proc means data=sashelp.cars mean median min max; by origin; run; It's because SASHELP.CARS is a SAS data set, and SAS data sets observations are stored and processed sequentially, and a BY group operation requires that the observations are already grouped and sorted
I edited my first issue of sascom magazine in the second quarter. Despite her new responsibilities, former Editor-in-Chief Alison Bolen made herself available for my many questions, concerns and frantic messages asking: “Does this sound okay??” It all came together, and we even debuted a new column on business analytics,
Was it the economy? the timing? the location? or the brilliant and good looking Forum panel? That will be for history (or you) to decide. What we do know is that is that the Institute of Business Forecasting’s Best Practices Conference in San Francisco, April 28-30, drew a large and
I mentioned last time that the technique we use to determine topics is a variant of something that has been around for fifty years. In this part I will talk about the intriguing history of this technique, and in the process, I hope to illuminate what we are doing and
As more organizations are realizing greater value tapping into their time series data in new and innovative ways, we are often asked about books we would recommend on time series analysis. I have consulted with some internal experts and wanted to post this list of recommended books on the topic since