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.
There are many ways to add more "visual impact" to your maps. Some techniques grab the users' attention, but often don't add anything useful to the message the map is trying to convey (such as 3D tricks, or flashy/gratuitous images and infographics). I encourage you to design maps that have
The Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak has been in the news a lot lately, and everyone is probably looking for a quick/easy way to see the data. The best visualization I've seen so far is this dashboard by Johns Hopkins. Here's a screen-capture: To Make the Best Better When I was growing
I've read several articles that mentioned the north magnetic pole has been moving more in the past few decades, than in the previous few hundred years. And as a Map Guy, I knew I just had to plot this data on a map, and see it for myself! I provide
The coronavirus has been a big item in the news lately - it's a pneumonia-like illness that has killed several people. It's thought to have started in China, and has spread to several other countries (including at least one case in the U.S.). The World Health Organization says the coronavirus
The flu season has started here in the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data it has caused 214 deaths in the first week of 2020. Is this number higher, or lower, than usual? When does the flu season start, and how long does
As I get older, a few of my buddies are starting to retire. And this makes me think about my own retirement (not that I'm anywhere near old enough to retire, mind you!) Therefore when I saw a list of the "Best & Worst Cities for Retiring" it caught my
If someone proposes a bet to you, then you should be suspicious that they already know they're going to win. And one frequent topic of such bets is the weather... What if I bet you there's a city in Canada with a warmer average January temperature than Raleigh, NC? You
Do you find yourself on the road during the holidays, and looking for a place to eat that's still open? Or perhaps you're like me - I don't cook at home, and I'm not really into visiting family for the holidays and eating with them. Well then, you probably know
The Rise of Skywalker, the final movie in the third set of the three Star Wars trilogies, will finally be released tomorrow (December 20, 2019). That's 9 movies, in about 42 years. And, if the first movies aren't still fresh in your mind (or perhaps you weren't even born when
I saw an article that claimed Donald Trump recently tweeted 123 times in one day. This got me wondering how many times he typically tweets during a day, and whether this number has changed over the years. This seems like it might be a good topic to analyze with a
I can tell that my area (Wake county, NC) has a growing population, because the traffic keeps getting worse and worse. But it's a little difficult to quantitatively gauge growth by looking at traffic congestion. Therefore let's have a look at a more direct measurement - the actual population data!
As we're getting into December, and the weather is getting colder, I thought it would be cool to plot some Antarctica data. You might remember I did this about 1.5 years ago, using good-old Proc Gmap, a special projection, and lots of tricky annotation. Well, this time let's use the
If you don't have a SAS/Graph license, then you're probably using the ODS Graphics 'sg' procedures that come with Base SAS to create your graphs and maps. And if you've tried plotting data on a map, you probably noticed that SGmap lets you overlay point-data on an OpenStreetmap, but you
North Carolina recently re-drew the congressional district boundaries for the upcoming 2020 election. Here's a copy of the new map, from the ncleg.gov website: A couple of years ago, I created an enhanced version of the 2016/18 map, and I thought I'd do the same for the new 2020 map...
The English language can be a bit tough to learn. One reason is that sometimes words can have more than one meaning. For example, the word shady can mean "of doubtful honesty or legality," or it can mean "giving shade from sunlight." Which of those meanings am I thinking about,
I recently saw in several social media posts that sales of vinyl records are forecast to be higher than sales of CDs this year (2019) for the first time since 1986. Two questions came to mind - 1) Is this true? and 2) Is this a big deal? Let's analyze
With all this sitting at a desk writing code, I have to do something to keep in shape. And for me, that something is paddling boats ... as fast as I can - and occasionally trying to race them. This past weekend I entered the race at Hunting Island, SC.
I was recently reading David Mintz's excellent SESUG 2018 conference paper on Five Crazy Good Visualizations and How to Plot Them, and saw a map that caught my eye. David showed how to create a similar map, but with completely different data - I decided to try creating a map
Eliud Kipchoge recently ran a marathon in under 2 hours. It was a special marathon where they had set up the best possible conditions to help him achieve this goal (such as swapping in pace-setting runners to block the wind for him), so it won't count as the world record
You've probably heard of the stupid 'challenges' where people usually end up hurting themselves (cinnamon challenge, Carolina reaper pepper challenge, etc). I thought it might be more helpful to society to have a challenge that could actually help people, rather than hurting them! Therefore I came up with the Halloween
The SAS Championship golf tournament is happening this week, here in Cary, North Carolina! If you're following along and watching the scores, you might wonder how they're doing compared to past years, and what kind of scores it generally takes to win. Follow along as I plot the data from
We've had record high 90+ degree temperatures here in the southeast US this past week (September / October), and it has made me appreciate having an air conditioner. Indeed, air conditioners were pretty much invented here in North Carolina (see Eric Cramer). They are used in pretty much every building
Lately we've been hearing a lot about "record low unemployment" in the news. Being a data guy, I wanted to see it for myself. Follow along as I create some custom unemployment graphs from the official data for California and New York (two of our most populous states). Or, if
North Carolina is one of those key "swing states" that might possibly decide a national presidential election. And with such an election coming up next year (2020), I thought I would have a look at the voter registration data to see how it has changed since the previous presidential election
Yesterday we had a 'special election' here in NC, to elect new members to the House of Representatives for Congressional Districts 3 and 9. The election got a lot of national news coverage, therefore I thought people might like seeing the results plotted on a map. Before I decided to
As we're in the thick of hurricane season, I'm sure some of my fellow map-makers are wanting to create their own custom hurricane maps. In this blog post, I step you through the process, so you'll know where to find all the pieces, and how to put them together. I
Summer is winding down, and cooler fall weather is just around the corner. You might soon be able to take a pleasant drive with the windows down, while enjoying the scenery. But where should you go? What are the most scenic roads for that drive? Read along to see a
It's that time of year again - the summer is coming to a close, and students are heading to college... And starting the clock ticking on accumulating that student loan debt! Before we get started, here's a little something to set the stage for this topic. This is a picture
I saw an interesting kangaroo map on reddit, and although the data was deemed "not entirely reliable" it seemed like a fun topic. And also a good exercise to try out the map labeling capabilities in the new Proc SGmap choropleth maps in SAS! For those of you not really
Flying drones was a new & exciting hobby, and very cool fad a few years ago. In recent years, the drone manufacturers have added some really nice features to make the drones easier to fly and more capable ... but the government also added some new rules that have curbed
