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.
Many areas of the US are experiencing record low unemployment. This is great at the national level, and also great at a personal level (for example, I now have fewer unemployed friends asking to borrow money!) But just how low is the US unemployment rate, and how does it compare
As we're approaching the anniversary of Hans Rosling's passing, I fondly remember his spectacular graphical presentations comparing the wealth and health of nations around the world. He certainly raised the bar for data visualization, and his animated charts inspired me to work even harder to create similar visualizations! What better way
They say "The Sun never sets on the SAS Empire" ... and it's true! There are SAS users all over the world, and SAS output & results could be in any language. Therefore, if you're a SAS programmer, you might need to know how to create SAS graphs with international
When I fill up my daily-driver Prius, the price of gasoline isn't that important. But when I occasionally take a trip in my V8 Suburban, I pay a lot more attention! Therefore I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that gasoline prices have been falling. How much have they fallen,
Certain North Carolina counties have been in the news lately, for suspected election fraud involving absentee ballots in the 2018 election. Let's analyze the voter registration and absentee ballot data, to see if we can detect anything suspicious! In order to definitively determine whether fraud & illegal activity occurred, investigators
We got our first 'big' snow of the season here at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC ... therefore I thought this would be a great time to dig into some snow data! Follow along and pick up some tips & tricks as I plot our snow data - and
It might snow this weekend here at the SAS headquarters! This would be the first snow of the season for us, and it got me thinking about snow again (see some of my previous blog posts about snow). Apparently these thoughts have manifested themselves in my computer graphics work ...
Do you remember The Matrix movies, that started coming out in 1999? Hopefully this movie franchise didn't give you a fear of virtual reality and AI. The thing I remember most from the movie was the really cool slow-motion video effects (from multiple angles) in the fight scenes. And the
This week I noticed that they've started building the lot where they sell Christmas trees near SAS (at the intersection of Maynard & Reedy Creek Rd). They put up a nice rustic wooden fence, and lights, and maybe even a fire pit to keep their workers warm. They sell some
I recently read an article that said a school in Asheville, North Carolina had the worst chickenpox outbreak in the state in 2 decades. The article was interesting, and it also let me know I had a hole in my knowledge ... "What?!? - There's a chickenpox vaccine?!?" When I
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this year's midterm election, when it comes to counting the ballots ... and I kept hearing the term provisional ballots in the news. But I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't really know much about provisional ballots. I decided to do a
The US 'midterm' elections have finally started to wind down, and we finally have some (mostly) finalized results to study. But what's the best way to visualize who won the US congressional seats in each of the 435 districts? Let's dive into this topic!... Preparation For starters, I couldn't find
With the recent midterm elections here in the US, I frequently saw congressional district maps popping up in the news. And being a GraphGuy, I wanted to fully understand these maps, to see if I might could improve them. If you're interested in congressional district maps, follow along as I
With today being an election day here in the US, I see a lot of people wearing the 'I Voted' sticker. This got me wondering if I could create my own sticker ... using SAS software and simple graphics primitives. :-) So I started by using Proc Gslide to create
Who says technical people can't have fun!?! Similar to Throwback Thursday / #TBT (when people post one of their old/nostalgic photos on social media), I like the tradition of Fun Friday when I use a fun data topic to test our software - a test can be just as rigorous using
President Donald Trump - people seem to either love him or hate him. Which makes for an interesting data-analysis topic ... tracking Trump's approval rating. Follow along as I explore some data! I'll start with what I consider the 'best' approval-rating graph I've found so far. Here's a screen-capture of
The other day I was playing around with the voter registration data for all ~8 million registered voters in North Carolina (yes - this guy knows how to have fun!), and I got to wondering what last names were the most common. I summarized the data by county, and the
This past Sunday was the last day of the NC State Fair, and we broke some records this year! Can you guess what those records were? I'll ramble on about the fair to give you time to come up with your guess, and then I'll let you know about the
Have you noticed a lot of graphs popping up lately, about politicians, voters, and elections? ... Well of course - it's an election year! If you follow my blog posts, then you're probably a bit "smarter than the average bear" when it comes to scrutinizing graphs. And election graphs election
Any of you who are even slightly into politics, or have followed any news lately, have probably seen something about the DNA test Elizabeth Warren took to prove/disprove her Native American ancestry. The test indicates she might have had a Native American ancestor 6 to 10 generations ago. That's a
Here in the US, we recently had a new Supreme Court Justice appointed. This is a very important position, and judges usually serve until they retire or die. My buddy Rick gave me a heads-up that there was a table of all the past & present justices on Wikipedia, and
I attended the Scottish Highland Games this past weekend ... nearby in Scotland County, North Carolina! They put on a great event, with kilt-wearing Scotsmen throwing things, bands playing bagpipes, kids dancing, and clans sharing their family history. And to get into the mood for this event, I decided to
Over the years, the US has drilled for crude oil in several locations, such as Pennsylvania, Texas, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico. A few years ago, as the US started drilling more in North Dakota, there were forecasts that we would surpass Saudi Arabia in crude oil production. And recently,
Here in North Carolina, a hurricane recently moved very slowly across our state, causing major flooding, and even closing miles of interstate highways for longer than a week. There is data available online for gauges along the river (or gages, as they call them), but I doubt many people know
"We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain, and big ol' fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." Was that a quote from the Forrest Gump movie, or something said regarding Hurricane Florence? Could be either one! Hurricane Florence recently came through
Here in North Carolina (NC), we're pretty much resigned to the fact that many of the hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean are going to visit us. NC sticks out farther into the ocean than most of our neighboring states, and that just makes a tempting target for the hurricanes. But
I usually create very technical graphs, that just focus on conveying the information in a concise and straightforward manner (no wasted colors, and nothing to distract you from the data). But sometimes, depending on your audience and the purpose of the graph, you might need to create a graph that
Many of the most beautiful areas in the US are owned by the government, to preserve them and allow access for everyone to enjoy them. And most US schools are traditionally closed during the summer, which provides families a great opportunity to go visit state and federal lands (parks, forests,
If you're good at games like Wheel of Fortune, Scrabble, or Words with Friends, you've probably figured out that certain letters appear more often than others. But do you have a cool way to figure out which letters appear most & least frequently? How about using a computer to plot
My buddy Chris recently blogged about accessing the IoT data from an M&M jar being monitored in one of the breakrooms at SAS. Now I'm going to take things a step further and analyze that data with some graphs. Grab a snack, and follow along, as we dig into this
