Data. Google uses ours every day, and most people aren't concerned. When our government is looking over our shoulders, however, tensions rise quickly. On the one end lies the recent scandals with the National Security Agency (NSA), which is apparently spying on you, me, and Angela Merkel. On the other lies case after case
This week's SAS tip is from Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide by Chris Holland and Jack Shostak. If you'd like to learn more about what CDISC offers, look no further. As SAS user Greg Nelson said, "Combined with useful advice and working examples, this treatise on CDISC implementation
The Analytics Conference series wrapped its last event of the year in Orlando and, as promised, there was plenty to take in during the two-day event. Now what? You can watch all the highlights, including full keynotes, on demand! Among the keynote presenters this year, SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight
Microsoft Windows 8 has been with us for a year, and its first major update -- Windows 8.1 -- has just arrived. So how does SAS support these Windows 8 platforms? The answer can be found on support.sas.com in SAS Note 46876. I'll summarize it here: SAS 9.3 and SAS
SAS 9.4 allows you to create html5 output with your graph inline (as part of the html), providing a great way to email your SAS/Graph output! Previously, if you used ods html and dev=png to create graphs, you had to deal with two files -- a png file (containing the graph)
One of the perks of being a SAS Press Author is being invited to give presentations at local SAS users group meetings. There are over 70 registered local SAS users groups distributed throughout the United States, from sea to shining sea. Local groups serve a given geographic area—often near a
Live from the Institute of Business Forecasting conference in Orlando this week, where I'm excited to announce that my longtime SAS colleague Charlie Chase just received the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the IBF and the forecasting profession. More details and and pictures later this week... Reminder:
Loraine Lawson recently used the Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism, in which practitioners are encouraged to pursue right views, intentions, speech, actions, livelihood, efforts, mindfulness and concentration, as inspiration for her blog post The Five-Fold Path for Ensuring Data = Information. The post offered five recommendations for ensuring that data is transformed into
The mosaic plot is a graphical visualization of a frequency table. In a previous post, I showed how to use the FREQ procedure to create a mosaic plot. This article shows how to create a mosaic plot by using the MOSAICPARM statement in the graph template language (GTL). (The MOSAICPARM
Health reform incentives for the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) have created a watershed event for business analytics. Whereas hospital EMR adoption was a paltry 12% less than 4 years ago, today more than 6,000 hospitals and 390,000 providers are participating. Combined with Medicare/Medicaid incentives that require shared data
Last time we explored consumption and usability as an alternative approach to data governance. In that framework, data stewards can measure the quality of the data and alert users about potential risks of using the results, but are prevented from changing the data. In this post we can look at
Before that headline really scares you, let me clarify - there hasn't been a single fraud scheme that managed to pull off a $2 trillion haul (yet). However, the fact remains that as rising scams, schemes, the gray market, work under the table and good old tax evasion escalate, as
Mosaic plots (Hartigan and Kleiner, 1981; Friendly, 1994, JASA) are used for exploratory data analysis of categorical data. Mosaic plots have been available for decades in SAS products such as JMP, SAS/INSIGHT, and SAS/IML Studio. However, not all SAS customers have access to these specialized products, so I am pleased
This week's SAS tip is from Renu Gehring and her brand new book SAS Business Intelligence for the Health Care Industry: Practical Applications. Renu is a SAS instructor, consultant, and analyst at CareOregon, Inc. After reading this week's free excerpt, visit Renu's author page for additional good information including book reviews and more. The
I had the chance to interview Natalie Kortum and Jack Chen of Dell at the Analytics 2013 conference in Orlando about how analytics is taking over business today and in the future. They both think we’ll see some big changes in the next five years. One of the most interesting
Liebe Mitarbeiter der Telekom AG, das Beste aus dem Web, wenn es um Business Analytics geht - zusammengestellt für die Mitarbeiter der Telekom AG. Nur darum geht es in diesem Newsletter. Das Ziel: Für Sie die wichtigsten Meldungen herauszufiltern, nicht mehr Information, sondern nur die wichtigsten Informationen weiterzugeben und so
While their fright factor is low, SAS books include a scary amount of knowledge. Regardless of your level of expertise, you're sure to find a book (or many) that jump out at you. Our SAS authors and publishing staff continuously work their magic to produce books filled with the kinds of examples,
SAS has been used to track the spread of many things, such as wild animals, tornadoes, and money launderers -- but this time I'm using it to track the spread of Walmart stores across the U.S. over time! Since its start in the 1960s, Walmart has grown to be the largest
Find out which SAS books were bestsellers during the hottest months of the year. While our books aren’t typically beach-reads, we did see a nice spike in sales during this period. And if you’ve followed some of our posts featuring top selling SAS books in the past, you’ll recognize some
Since tomorrow is How-long-has-it-been-since-you-used-this-data-ween, it’s time to review your organization’s preparedness for preventing the zombie data-pocalypse. (Please Note: This should not be confused with your organization’s preparedness for preventing the zombie apocalypse, for which check out the resources provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by ever-so-carefully clicking on
I was looking at someone else's SAS/IML program when I saw this line of code: y = sqrt(x<>0); The statement uses the element maximum operator (<>) in the SAS/IML language to make sure that negative value are never passed to the square root function. This little trick is a real
Okay, given the title of this article, I might be overselling the content a bit. Read on to see if your life will be transformed. I've just returned from SESUG, and this question came up during one of the presentations. While this tip might seem basic, it was news to
Many people today just use their computer to play Angry Birds or post pictures of their most recent meal on Facebook ... but what would some of the great minds of the past have done with a computer?... For example, Charles Minard was creating impressive information graphics without a computer over 100 years ago,
If you've ever tried to use PROC FREQ to create a frequency table of two character variables, you know that by default the categories for each variable are displayed in alphabetical order. A different order is sometimes more useful. For example, consider the following two-way table for the smoking status
Almost since the first commercially viable inventory optimization solutions arrived on the scene in the early 2000s, the industry has been overhyped. It has been amazing to see the number of focuses placed on inventory optimization by various analyst organizations. Just pulling them up on a search engine shows the
Elbphilharmonie, Stuttgarter Bahnhof, Berliner Flughafen – das sind die drei prominentesten Beispiele für sich andauernd verzögernde und verteuernde Großprojekte. Gerade die politischen und personalstrategischen Auseinandersetzungen um BER haben das Thema in dieser Woche wieder auf die Agenda gebracht. Als unbefangener Bürger bekommt man den Eindruck, dass dies eine Grundregel sei.
Reacting to the demand in the rapidly changing environment of an emergency department can be a major challenge. Frequent mismatches between patient need and the health care professionals available to provide that care can result in significant human and financial costs. Analytics 2013 Orlando presenters, Kevin Armstrong of Vanderbilt University
This graph certainly makes it clear! I can see right through your lies! Clearly, you know what you're talking about! We need more transparency in our organization! What was that all about, you might ask?!? ... I was just getting all the obvious puns out of the way, so I
A challenge for statistical programmers is getting data into the right form for analysis. For graphing or analyzing data, sometimes the "wide format" (each subject is represented by one row and many variables) is required, but other times the "long format" (observations for each subject span multiple rows) is more
SAS author Michael Raithel says it best: “Why shouldn't you be the person who gets the most challenging assignments, who contributes the most to key projects, who gets the top pay, who is sent to training, who management counts on, and who junior programmers look up to? The answer to
