Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.
How long do dogs live? ... That's a good/tough question. Some live longer than others, but what are the determining factors? Let's throw some data to this problem, and see if we can fetch some answers! But before we get started, how about a random picture to get you into
Who's to say that 'north' should always be at the top of a map? Perhaps in certain situations, you might want 'south' (or some other direction) to be at the top. Perhaps you're one of our crazy Australian customers who looks at the world a little differently. Well, whatever the
I hope you're all doing well, in this year of plagues and locusts! I'm sure I don't even need to mention which plague I'm talking about. But what about the locusts? Are you up on your entomological studies? Follow along, and see if you really know what locusts are... Locusts
Having earned the Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts, I am of course very conservation-minded, and against polluting. I'm also an avid boat paddler and fisherman, and therefore I'm especially concerned about pollution in our rivers, lakes, and oceans. I even volunteered for a week to help survey coral reefs
I've got this buddy, Carter Johnson - he's a little bit crazy, but a lot of fun to follow... He holds/held several different long-distance paddling world records, and was one of the coaches for the group that paddled kayaks from Cuba to the US (see my blog post). A few
You've probably seen a population pyramid, such as this one I showed in a previous blog post. But let's scrutinize population pyramids a bit deeper, with an eye on special features that can make them even more useful! I was inspired to give population trees a second look by this
In a discussion on a Reddit map group, someone claimed "Maine is the US state closest to Africa." Is that true? Can I use my SAS mapping tools to confirm, or bust, this myth? Follow along, as I dive in! ... The Map in my Head (Wrong!) My gut instincts
Here in the US, the pipeline which supplies gasoline to North Caroline (and much of the southeast) was hacked, and had to be shut down for several days. This caused gasoline shortages, and long lines at the gas pumps (as shown in the picture below, by my friend Daniel). But
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake (by surface area) in the world. And its largest island is Isle Royale. And its largest lake is Lake Siskiwit. And its largest island is Ryan Island. Ryan Island's largest (seasonal) pond is called Moose Flats. And it contains an 'island' (or a
I think one of the great uses of analytics and graphics is to show things like cancer clusters on a map. There are many factors that can lead to a higher incidence of diseases in geographical areas, and chemicals are often the culprit. For example, paraquat has been potentially linked
Every 10 years the United States conducts a Census where we count all the people. This week the 2020 Census population totals for each state were released. And how might these numbers affect you? ... One thing the Census numbers are used for is to determine how many of the
Everybody likes to learn a bit of interesting trivia... It could make you look smart, or might help you win a bet in a bar. Or maybe give you something to amaze your kids with. Do you know what's the biggest non-domesticated land animal in your state? How about all
Have you ever brought home a piece of furniture-in-a-box, and felt undue stress while trying to make sense of the directions to assemble it? ... Apparently you're not alone! A recent analysis studied ~50,000 tweets about IKEA furniture, and determined whether the people posting the tweets were frustrated. They then
This is another in my series of blog posts where I take a deep dive into converting R graphs into SAS graphs. Today we'll be working on pie charts. I know, I know ... you visualization 'purists' might be wagging your finger at me, and saying "pie charts are no good."
This is another in my series of blog posts where I take a deep dive into converting customized R graphs into SAS graphs. Today we'll be working on bar charts ... And to give you a hint about what data I'll be using this time, here's a picture from a SAS
This is another in my series of blog posts where I take a deep dive into converting customized R graphs into SAS graphs. Today we'll be working on shapefile maps ... And what data will we be using this time? Here's a hint - the picture below is the Aurora
This is another in my series of blog posts where I take a deep dive into converting customized R graphs into SAS graphs. Today we'll be working on bubble maps - specifically, plotting earthquake data as bubbles on a map. R bubble map, created using geom_polygon() and geom_point() SAS bubble
This is another in my series of blogs where I take a deep dive into converting customized R graphs into SAS graphs. Today I show how to combine several graphs with shared axes, which we'll call paneled graphs. This time I'll be plotting the Job Openings Rate by Industry, similar
This is another in my series of blogs where I take a deep dive into converting a customized R graph into a SAS graph. Today I'm focusing on a diverging bar chart (where one bar segment is above the zero line, and the other is below). What type of data
This is another in my series of blogs where I take a deep dive into converting a customized R graph into a SAS ODS Graphics graph. Can you guess what data I'll be using this time? Here's a photo with a hint. This is Keeler, California (just west of Death
This is another in my series of blogs where I take a deep dive into converting a customized R graph into a SAS ODS Graphics graph. This time the example is a needle plot (that's essentially like a bar plot, with lots of tiny bars, plotted along a continuous xaxis).
In the past, Sanjay showed how to create several basic graphs using both R and SAS ODS Graphics code. I'm going to take a bit of a "deeper dive" and focus a series of blog posts on highly customized graphs. Hopefully the code for these customizations will provide you with
I recently had a discussion with a friend, and we were wondering about Apple's market share. This led me to look into the actual data ... finding the online charts lacking, and then designing my own charts. Follow along if you're curious about the process of improving the charts, or
If you've been stuck at home a lot lately, and think you have run out of movies to watch -- think again! Here is a list of big-budget movies you might not have seen, because they flopped (lost lots of money). Follow along as I show you how I created
Have you been stuck at home, dreaming up the next big trip you'll take after this pandemic is over? How will you pick a really cool location to visit? Perhaps you can ask your friends for suggestions. My co-worker (and lunch buddy) John recommended the Grand Prismatic Spring. Here's a
If you have plotted data on a map, you have probably tried to estimate the geographical (or visual) 'center' of map areas, to place labels there. But have you ever given any thought to the "center of population"? This is one of the myriad of statistics the US Census Bureau
A user commented on one of my previous maps ... "How can there be 820 cases of Coronavirus per 100,000 people? - There aren't even 100,000 people in my county!" Well, when you want to compare something like the number of COVID-19 cases between two areas that have differing populations,
When it comes to plotting mortgage rate data, I often look to Len Kiefer for inspiration. He recently posted a retro-looking graph on twitter that caught my eye ... and of course I had to see if I could create something similar using SAS. For lack of a better term,
Here in the United States, we have our general election (where we elect the president) every four years - and 2020 happens to be one of those election years. This time we seem to have a lot more people voting early. I can't tell you the reason they're voting early
Now that we are many months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we can start to reexamine the data and look for trends. This time, I want to explore how COVID-19 has been spreading around the US. I do this by animating a county map over time. What is animation? Are you
