All Posts
We just wrapped up our work at the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings, where over 6,000 statisticians convened in Washington, DC. The theme for this year’s meeting was Statistics: From Evidence to Policy. Since I started working with SAS Press, I’ve made sure that JSM was one of the events that
Like any good SAS employee, I monitor the social Web for conversations about analytics. Not that I’m an analytics geek – far from it. As a lifelong writer and marcomms veteran, the quants view me as about as comprehensible (and as substantial) as navel lint. It’s for precisely that reason
As an acquisitions editor in SAS Press, it has been my pleasure over the years to work with many hard-working, dedicated, and talented authors. Three of those authors have teamed up to write the long-awaited update to Output Delivery System: The Basics by Lauren Haworth, which was published in the
Have you ever submitted a SAS program or query only to immediately regret it? It usually happens just as you finish clicking the mouse or lift your finger from the F8 key: you realize that your program has a horrible flaw that's going to make it run for hours or
The SAS internal discussion boards are always full of fascinating topics, some of which are even decipherable to a non-Ph.D. in statistics like me. A recent topic involved how to calculate the benefits of good forecasting software, and my colleague Robin Way offered an interesting perspective that he allowed me
Personally, I don’t get Twitter. I have an account (mvgilliland) for anyone interested in not hearing any tweets from me. I follow a few people and have a few followers (including some that aren't porn bots) -- but what is the point? Does anyone really care that I’m out hanging
In a previous posting I showed an example of how you can use the GKPI procedure in SAS 9.2 to create dashboard-quality charts. Here's a more formal sample that you can use, including a custom task that you can use in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 to point-and-click your way the
Geoff posted a nice article on his blog about how you can read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets programmatically from within SAS, without using DDE. I've previously written about how it's difficult to continue using DDE from SAS when you have a distributed environment (SAS on a server machine, Excel
We talk a lot here about how we’re using social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook to publicize our books. I was a late comer to these applications and, like a lot of people of my generation, came to them with a high degree of skepticism. I won’t say
The Summer 2009 issue of Foresight is now available, and features a section on “Rethinking the Ways We Forecast.” Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: Are traditional forecasting tools suitable for predicting complex systems like the economy and the global climate? Basically, no, argue David Orrell and Patrick McSharry: such
Big news in our industry this morning: IBM plans to buy analytics software vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion. In one sense, I'm sad to see SPSS disappearing into the large IBM stack. Besides SAS, SPSS was one of the last independent analytic software companies. A colleague says, “It’s the end
Last weekend, I joined the merry band of muggles who descended on theaters across America to catch the opening weekend of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Although not strictly by the book, the movie captured the teenage angst and special brand of magic that makes this particular novel
On a Monday July 20 segment of consumer advocate Clark Howard’s radio show, Clark discussed the common practice of hidden payments to influential bloggers. Apparently these high-tech shills pocket the payola, and then make favorable postings about particular products or services. According to Clark, there are new rules to prevent
Aren’t the internets wonderful? Just today I was trying to find the antonym of “naïve” and came across several terrific choices (sophisticated, worldly, well-informed, and intelligent) and one that didn’t make any sense (svelte???). However, upon further review at Merriam-Webster.com, I discovered that in addition to slender, lithe, and sleek
Almost every other article or blog or survey I read nowadays discusses virtualization and cloud computing topics. Why? Partly because IT operations and infrastructure professionals are facing difficulty monitoring and managing computing resources in a distributed environment. They have to ensure that capacity is always available to be assigned as