Unbelievable: It's already August. When I was a child, my mother used to talk about how time flies when you become an adult, and that I shouldn't wish my life away by always wanting to be older than my years or longing for something that was just beyond my maturity
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In this Innovation Inspiration, a SAS user has developed the insurance rating plans for a country using predictive modeling. How exciting! Additionally, the system adjusts based upon actual experience. This is quite the accomplishment given the complexity of the ratemaking for even a small geographical territory. The comments section reveal the identity of this innovator. Check it out.
Poster presentations are a great opportunity to present in a less formal, less stressful format than the full session, but the poster presentation still gives you a great opportunity for professional feedback and a chance to go to a great conference. Well, good news! You still have time to submit
Earlier this month SAS announced some really big news: DataFlux®, which has delivered market-leading data management solutions to customers for more than a decade, is now fully integrated into the SAS organization. The combination of the two brands helps customers build an integrated information management strategy supporting data management and
I just received this note in my inbox and wanted to make sure you also have all up-to-the-minute details about the SAS Professionals Convention: Dear SAS Professional, This year's SAS Professionals Convention is just over a week away. Although we've sold out of tickets for Tuesday, places are still available for
It's so important for companies to build what customers want rather than build a product and then convince the market to buy it. So I love it when I hear or read remarks like the one below - SAS has grown with me. That means that we have listened to
For all of you whipper snappers (a loving term applied to generations younger than yourself) who haven't been around SAS since the beginning of time - like Phil Miller, Art Carpenter and Kathy Council have - you may not remember when SAS Users Groups conference proceedings weren't offered online. That's right
Many of you know Mike Zdeb. He's a long-time SAS user and frequent presenter at SAS conferences. Zdeb is also a reviewer of many SAS Press books and author of his own SAS book, Maps Made Easy Using SAS. Zdeb contacted me after he read the May SAS Tech Report
According to Janet Stuelpner and Joseph Hantsch, the authors of the 2012 SAS Global Forum paper, One at a Time; Producing Patient Profiles and Narratives, patient profiles are used several ways depending upon the 'customer' need.
The first time that I saw a demonstration of SAS Visual Analytics Explorer was awesome, but it didn't give me goosebumps. I got goosebumps the size of golfballs during SAS Global Forum Opening Session when Dr. Goodnight sat down at a computer screen and began to demonstrate how effortlessly users can
When the IASUG conference founder and 2012 co-chair John Xu was asked what makes this one-day event so successful year after year, he said, “The most important factor is the leadership. We are lucky that we have core conference volunteers committed to supporting the conference.”
In this Flipcam video by SAS' Steve Polilli, Don Kros and Jon Boase discuss the methodology they developed to help SAS users in their organization advance their SAS skills. Kros and Boase submitted a poster, which you'll see in the video, and a paper "The Path to Developing Your Organization's SAS Skills,"
SAS and SAS users have a great history of collaborating to build and improve SAS software. Soon, that history will be repeated (on a grander scale!) with the development of the SAS Leadership Council.
If you live anywhere in the Midwestern United States (you know who I'm talking about, those of you in the 12 states in the map to the right), you must be breathing a sigh of relief right about now. Why? Because the MWSUG (MidWest SAS Users Group) Call for Papers deadline
One of the coolest things that I saw at SAS Global Forum was Dr. Goodnight dissecting a hologram of a SAS high-performance server and describing how the technology works with analytics. This is the height of innovation. You have got to watch this! Here are a few great
I found this great video on AllAnalytics.com. It was shot while you guys were at SAS Global Forum and has soooo many great SAS users talking about the reasons that you love to go to SAS Global Forum. Take a look: Now that you have heard their reasons, tell me
Put up or shut up is one of those great sayings from my generation. Loosely translated it means, stop complaining if you aren't going to do something about the problem. In this week's Innovation Inspiration, the author decided to teach American middle schoolers how to question the information that they
If you missed PharmaSUG - as I did - you still like to stay on top of the great information that comes out of the conference. I found the list of Best Contributed Papers and decided to post them here for you. There is a lot of other great information
If you're looking for some good stuff to read ... I mean great stuff for SAS users, I've had this list brewing in my head for a few weeks now. (The reason that I ask is because in the US, this weekend will be a three-day holiday to commemorate Memorial Day. So, many families will
At SAS Global Forum, one of the most difficult areas for me to show to you are the poster presentations. This year, I asked Steve Polilli, a colleague who is great with a Flipcam, to video a few for me. I picked out three that I will use in the
Here is the last video from the last day at SAS Global Forum 2012. This one is great! Make sure you stay in there long enough to watch the outtakes: they are so funny!
Annette Harris spends several minutes during this video extolling many of the high-performance virtues of Pete Lund, Information Systems Manager, Looking Glass Analytics. One thing she didn't mention (it was mentioned to me later) is that Pete is a long-time member of SAS-L. Do you know how many other SAS
SESUG (Southeast SAS Users Group Conference) is an annual conference held in the Southeast US - typically in September or October. This year, the conference will be held at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center in Durham, North Carolina, October 14-16. According to Peter Eberhardt, SESUG 2012 Academic Chair, the
Part of what captivated me about this paper and poster presentation were the presenters - these guys are high school kids using SAS to do a visual analysis of Internet use by high schoolers. The idea was so compelling that Anna Brown and Inside SAS Global Forum went to talk
So, when you go to the game, do you buy a hot dog, a beer and a banner before the first quarter? Do you buy them all from the same vendor? Do you go back during the half? Does the score impact how much money you spend on concessions? All
Stanley Fogleman says that SAS can be hard to learn on your own - not because it is a difficult language - but because of the various business requirements. In fact, even college students entering the workforce are often ill-prepared in some ways. That's why Fogleman believes that a SAS mentoring program
SAS already has some cool mobile Business Intelligence apps. Now, Scott McQuiggan tells Anna Brown, in this Inside SAS Global Forum interview, that you can view the really cool high-performance analytics reports that you've created on your desktop - right from your mobile device. Check this out!!
Jenn Sykes (you probably remember her from this great sentiment analysis post last year about American Idol), presented Predicting Electoral Outcomes with SAS® Sentiment Analysis and SAS® Forecast Studio at SAS Global Forum 2012. In addition to predicting elections, Sykes tells Anna Brown from Inside SAS Global Forum, that there is a lot of unstructured data
According to Carlos André Reis Pinheiro, social networks in communications are easy to understand and detect, so Oi Telecommunications chose that route first when trying to detect fraud. Community detection for fraud proved to be somewhat different. It is a progressive search, from looking at the entire network to looking
Congratulations to all of you who presented at SAS Global Forum. It takes a lot of hard work to put together the research, write a paper and presentation, and then stand on stage and present to a crowd of people you have never met. You are amazing. From all of