This week's SAS tip is from Lora Delwiche and Susan Slaughter's new edition of The Little SAS Book. This book, now in its fifth edition, has helped thousands and thousands of SAS users and is a must-have for any SAS book shelf. If you'd like to learn more about this
An epic clash across the continent of Europe Every year since 1956 the nations of Europe (and now beyond) have come together to decide who has the best popular song. The contest has launched the careers of many global pop stars, most notably the unforgettable Swedish foursome, ABBA. No one
I'm currently working on a large project for a SAS customer. The project comprises many activities and phases, so there is a need to track progress on many different levels. During a recent meeting the project manager announced, "I'm putting together a status deck, and I'll include some Harvey Balls
El Big Data y la Nube se están volviendo inseparables: “se necesitan recursos en la nube para el almacenamiento y la ejecución de proyectos de big data, y el big data brinda a las compañías una buena ocasión de pasar a la nube”. Podríamos decir que el big data y
In my previous post, I discussed sampling error (i.e., when a randomly chosen sample doesn’t reflect the underlying population, aka margin of error) and sampling bias (i.e., when the sample isn’t randomly chosen at all), both of which big data advocates often claim can, and should, be overcome by using all the data. In this
Last week Chris Hemedinger posted an article about spam that is sent to SAS blogs and discussed how anti-spam software helps to block spam. No algorithm can be 100% accurate at distinguishing spam from valid comments because of the inherent trade-off between specificity and sensitivity in any statistical test. Therefore,
Jill Dyché, internationally recognized speaker, author and business consultant, spends her days talking to businesses about big data – how they’re using it, challenges, successes, strategies, plans and more. What she’s hearing again and again from IT leaders is that they have to innovate with big data, move quickly and
All my friends seem to be having twins these days (below is a picture of my friend Holly's twins, for example) - I wondered if I could use SAS to analyze this twinning trend ... When I was growing up, way back in the day, twins seemed to be rarity.
I’m headed to San Diego, June 1-4, for the annual PharmaSUG conference. PharmaSUG is the Pharmaceutical Industry SAS Users Group, consisting of professionals worldwide in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries who use SAS software in their work. I am representing SAS Publications in the Demo Room and would love to
All Analytics spoke with several leaders at the recent SAS Global Forum Executive Conference on what it means to build an analytics culture. Here’s a video of those conversations. The video features several sections related to building an analytics culture: Kim Nevala, Director of Business Strategy for the SAS Best
Which would you rather see - a table of numbers, or a nice graph? When it comes to unemployment numbers, I vote for the graph! The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides several tables of data about the U.S. workforce. One such table (Table A-15) provides several different alternative measures
Principle 5: Timeliness – A bank should be able to generate aggregate and up-to-date risk data in a timely manner while also meeting the principles relating to accuracy and integrity, completeness and adaptability. A timely and accurate view of risk exposure, aggregated across credit counterparties and financial products could have
SAS programmers are probably familiar with how SAS stores a character variable in a data set, but how is a character vector stored in the SAS/IML language? Recall that a character variable is stored by using a fixed-width storage structure. In the SAS DATA step, the maximum number of characters
Ofrecer a los mexicanos Educación de Calidad es parte de la Estrategia Digital Nacional; para llevar a cabo este objetivo el Gobierno de la República Mexicana plantea la integración y aprovechamiento de las TIC en el proceso educativo, de tal manera que sea posible insertar al país en la Sociedad
I'm an avid Star Wars fan, and am cautiously optimistic about what J.J. Abrams intends to do in Star Wars VII. The cast for the movie was revealed earlier this week, and today is May the Fourth, an unofficial Star Wars holiday. You might be asking yourself what any of
If you've followed technology news in the last few weeks, you've probably seen a proliferation of awestruck faces wearing blacked out goggles, similar to the image I'm using here. The goggles are Oculus Rift immersive VR headsets, and the news is the $2 billion dollar acquisition of Oculus by Facebook.
For the second year in a row, I am headed to the European Analytics conference. This year the conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany, June 4-5. Last year’s conference was so informative. I learned more about SAS’ analytical power, and I talked to many customers about the books that SAS
My oldest son is in the school band, and they are getting ready for their spring concert. Their fall concert was wonderful; hearing dozens of students with their specific instruments playing together creates beautiful, rich sounding music. The depth of sound from orchestral or symphonic music is unmatched. In data
Ed wants to make sure that the next generation of technology is accessible, and the best way to do that is to ensure the next generation of computer scientists understand the needs of users with disabilities. So, he and I get out of the office on a regular basis to
Here at SAS, we've come a long way with how we deal with blog spam on blogs.sas.com. Last year at this time, I was sifting through dozens of spam messages per day in order to salvage the one or two genuine comments that originate from real readers. I was just
As we saw in Steve Morlidge's study of forecast quality in the supply chain (Part 1, Part 2), 52% of the forecasts in his sample were worse than a naive (random walk) forecast. This meant that over half the time, these companies would have been better off doing nothing and
Debido al crecimiento masivo de las Tecnologías de la Información en la última década, el Chief Information Officer (CIO) ha pasado de tener una función de apoyo de back-office a una unidad de negocio crítica para las decisiones rentables del negocio. En la actualidad se ubica entre las cinco áreas con
Instead of using a crystal ball to find out what the future holds for analytics, I decided to do something even better -- ask Udo Sglavo, SAS Forecasting R&D director. Sglavo breaks down the benefits of two new SAS analytical clients, SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Forecast Server in this
In his recent Financial Times article, Tim Harford explained the big data that interests many companies is what we might call found data – the digital exhaust from our web searches, our status updates on social networks, our credit card purchases and our mobile devices pinging the nearest cellular or WiFi network.
While at a conference recently, I was asked whether it was possible to use SAS to simulate data from an inverse gamma distribution. The SAS customer had looked at the documentation for the RAND function and did not see "inverse gamma" listed among the possible choices. The answer is "yes."
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger ist Oxford-Professor, Berater internationaler Organisationen sowie einer der Keynote-Speaker der re:publica 2014. In seinem Bestseller „Big Data: Eine Revolution, die unser Leben verändern wird" wirft er ein kritisches Licht auf Big Data Analytics – zeichnet aber auch positive Szenarien auf. Wir haben ihn gefragt zu seinen Forderungen an
With tornadoes in the news lately, I wondered how I might could use SAS to analyze tornado data. How about animating 60 years of tornado path data? ... I was using Google to search for ways to analyze tornado data, and found an example on ustornadoes.com that animates the tornado
I led an analytical culture track at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference last month in Washington, DC. I talked with leaders in fields as diverse as healthcare, chemical manufacturing and government. Although these organizations have very different operating models, their challenges, comments and questions were similar. They all recognized
I was asked to speak recently on a topic that includes two hyped terms: Big data and sustainability. At the risk of igniting an anti-buzzword campaign, I added a third over-used term to that list: analytics. Even though individuals and companies use those three words – big data, sustainability, and
With as much as I travel, I have to confess that I’ve become a bit of a food snob. And for good reason, I might add. Two days in a Chilean hospital will make anyone stick with what they know and trust. After that experience, it was just me and
