I've long been fascinated by both science and the natural world around us, inspired by the amazing Sir David Attenborough with his ever-engaging documentaries and boundless enthusiasm for nature, and also by the late, great Carl Sagan and his ground-breaking documentary series, COSMOS. The relationships between the creatures, plants and
Whether your resolution is to get SAS certified or to become a more advanced SAS programmer, we’ve got you covered with these new titles and upcoming SAS Press books, many of which will be making their bookshelf debut at SAS® Global Forum 2017 in Orlando, FL! Want to be notified when a new book
“La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” -- Mitch Hedberg, comedian Mitch Hedberg's joke resonates with travelers who drive on the US interstate system because many highway exits feature both a La Quinta Inn™ and a Denny's® restaurant within a short distance of each other. But does a
At SAS, we've published more repositories on GitHub as a way to share our open source projects and examples. These "repos" (that's Git lingo) are created and maintained by experts in R&D, professional services (consulting), and SAS training. Some recent examples include: sas_kernel, which provides Jupyter notebook support for SAS.
Much of my recent work has been along the theme of modernization. Analytics is not new for many of our customers, but standing still in this market is akin to falling behind. In order to continue to innovative and remain competitive, organizations need to be prepared to embrace new technologies
What are the most useful skills a data quality leader can possess? As an editor of an online data quality magazine, I naturally get asked this type of question regularly at events and meetups. My answer may surprise some who are expecting a data-centric response. I firmly believe that sales and
If you do much traveling in the United States, you're bound to hear a few words and expressions that are unique to certain areas. Well y'all get ready, because I'm fixin' to analyze some of those words for ya! I recently found a really neat web application called The Great
I wrote 105 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2016. My most popular articles were about data analysis, SAS programming tips, and elementary statistics. Without further ado, here are the most popular articles from 2016. Data Analysis and Visualization Start with a juicy set of data and an interesting
.@philsimon says that privacy is your issue as well whether you believe it or not.
How many of you have been given a SAS data set with variables such as Age, Height, and Weight and some or all of them were stored as character values instead of numeric? Probably EVERYONE! Yes, we all know how to do the old "swap and drop" (rename and convert), but
Data analysis can be used for many things ... how about finding other beers you might like, so you don't keep drinking the same old brand every time? Hang on tight - I think we're about to make a beer run! I recently read an interesting article on the Flowingdata website,
This SAS Jedi is very excited about the SAS 9.4 M4 release, which brought many wonderful gifts just in time for Christmas. So in the interest of extending the Christmas spirit, I'm going to blog about some of my favorites! I've long loved the SAS DO statement variant which allows
In the previous three blogs in this series, we talked about what metadata can be available from source systems, transformation and movement, and operational usage. For this final blog in the series, I want to discuss the analytical usage of metadata. Let’s set up the scenario. Let's imagine I'm a
Die Digitalisierung wird ja angeblich alles ändern. Oder sogar revolutionieren. Das gilt sowohl für unser Privat- wie auch das Berufsleben. Unsere Arbeitsweisen und Gewohnheiten werden sich an die digitale Gesellschaft anpassen. Ob wir wollen oder nicht. Gleichfalls werden sich Strukturen und Organisationsformen in Unternehmen verändern. Und diese Veränderungen machen auch
How can you generate data that contains outliers in a simulation study? The contaminated normal distribution is a simple but useful distribution you can use to simulate outliers. The distribution is easy to explain and understand, and it is also easy to implement in SAS. What is a contaminated normal
SAS temporary arrays are an underutilized jewel in the SAS toolbox. I find that many beginning to intermediate SAS programmers are not familiar with temporary arrays. The good news is that there is nothing complicated about them and they are very useful. First of all, what is a temporary array?
It’s no secret that the US energy landscape has undergone massive changes in recent years: the emergence of cost-effective renewables, the natural gas revolution, the wide-scale penetration of intelligence across energy delivery networks, and soon a new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All of these changes are impacting different pockets of
It's that time of year again. Holidays, parties, gifts, cooking, closing annual business, hitting targets and preparing for 2017. Looking back on the year for the communication and media industries, it has been a year of transition for the industry and for many of the customers I work with in my role
Es ist momentan viel die Rede von Digitalisierung. Dabei wird die Zukunft beschrieben, in der fast alle Informationen in digitaler Form vorliegen, was unser Leben und Arbeiten maßgeblich beeinflussen wird. Aber leben wir nicht schon längst in einer digitalen Welt, ohne es bemerkt zu haben? Ich habe mir dazu ein
TL; DR Free training from SAS: "SAS Programming for R Users." Check the available Live Web offerings and register for one that fits your schedule. Or use the free e-Learning version and learn at your own pace. The complete course materials are on the SAS Software GitHub space and you
In my last post we started looking at the issue of identifier proliferation, in which different business applications assigned their own unique identifiers to data representing the same entities. Even master data management (MDM) applications are not immune to this issue, particularly because of the inherent semantics associated with the
The utility industry is ripe with analytic opportunities. Usually, when I share that perspective, thoughts immediately jump to making the energy grid more efficient. Certainly, there are efficiencies to gain with improved data about where power is being consumed and the sources that are available to support it. However, there
In einen glühenden Schlund blicke ich, als öffne sich eine Höllenpforte; Hitze schlägt mir entgegen: Aus dem Stoßofen wird eine Stahlbramme geschoben, zum Walzen auf etwa 1.250 Grad Celsius erwärmt. Lärmend und zischend wird der Stahlblock ausgewalzt und schließlich als wenige Millimeter dickes Blechband aufgerollt, eine gewaltige Spule, tonnenschwer …
Editor's note: This series of blogs addresses the questions we are most frequently asked at SAS Press! Do you have a great book idea already in mind, or think you might want to write about an analytics or industry topic? Consider writing a SAS Press book or a SAS &
Unless you live in England, you may not have seen the recent announcement that Buckingham Palace is to undergo a 10-year refurbishment costing the British taxpayer £369M. Even with the post-Brexit devaluation of Sterling, that’s still a sizable spend representing nearly US$500 million. The Queen will remain in residence during
Are you a visualization & graphing expert? Can you identify which tool (R, Excel, Tableau, SPSS, Matlab, JS, Python, or SAS) was used to create each of these graphs? No cheating! I recently read Tim Matteson's blog where he presented 18 graphs, and had his readers try to guess which
I find I am so busy these days, I do all of my holiday shopping online. I set aside an hour, a glass of wine and my credit card, and I get the gifts ordered. The must-have gift for this year was a Dyson hair dryer. When the first site
As states build systems to evaluate the effectiveness of educator preparation programs, they must first know what “effectiveness” looks like. Are the characteristics of the candidates in the program, such as high school GPA, ACT or SAT score, or other admissions criteria, the most important indicators? What about the curriculum
As I discussed in the first two blogs of this series, metadata is useful in a variety of ways. Its importance starts at the source system, and continues through the data movement and transformation processes and into operations. Operational metadata, in particular, gives us information about the execution and completion
I am writing this post with the satisfaction of having Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide, Second Edition completed and on the shelf. Once again, it was my pleasure to collaborate with Chris Holland, and I am glad that we had a chance to update the book with current
