Occasionally, people ask me what is the best thing about writing a book. Is it the notoriety you get from being a SAS Press author? Fame is always pleasant. Is it the money you make from the advance and the royalties? Money is always useful. Is it displaying technical expertise
In SAS 9.4, the SAS programming language continues add new features by the truckload. I've already discussed PROC DELETE (which is actually an old feature, but like an 80s hit song it's now back with a better version). In this SAS Tech Talk video from SAS Global Forum 2013, I
If you need an excuse to get out of the office and perhaps learn a thing or two this fall, here are three upcoming events: Foresight Practitioner Conference: S&OP and Collaborative Forecasting (Columbus, OH, September 25-26) From the campus of Ohio State University, Foresight's editor Len Tashman and S&OP column
Brands like Comcast, Dell, and Nike have made names for themselves on Twitter as customer service pros. Their responses to customer mentions in the social sphere are known for being useful, timely and fun. At SAS, we were hoping to develop a similar program for monitoring and responding to our
Earlier this week I posted a "guest blog" in which my 8th grade son described a visualization of data for the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The purpose of today's blog post is to present a higher-level statistical analysis of the same data. I will use a t test and a
Teil 1: Performancekiller Der SAS Enterprise Guide ist ein sehr intuitives und trotzdem ausgesprochen mächtiges Graphical User Interface. Neben einer kompletten Programmieroberfläche, bietet er eine Menge Point- and Click Anwendungsroutinen, durch welche man vom Einlesen von Excel-Dokumenten, über SQL-Abfragen, bis hin zu komplexen Grafiken und Vorhersagemodellierungen, mit ein paar Klicks alles erreichen
Do you have “dead data”? Data that is not relevant or trustworthy? Data that muddles reports and makes data-driven decision making difficult, or even impossible, to manage? If you do, you are in good company as this is an enormous problem throughout higher education. Not to mention, as with all
Die Entwicklung der Rechenkapazitäten ist so rasant, dass man sich das gelegentlich vor Augen führen muss. Vor einem halben Jahrhundert sind Menschen regelmäßig ins All geflogen – mit Computern, deren Leistungsfähigkeit heute von jedem Smartphone übertroffen wird. Während vor wenigen Jahren noch hochqualifizierte Spezialfirmen viele Monate und Jahre für Planung
Last month, a question came in via an earlier blog post. Peter Timusk, a reader of SAS books and potential author, asked Emmett Cox how to be seen as the expert you are by writing a book. Emmett was more than happy to answer Peter’s question. “First pick a topic that
As student growth or value-added measures become more prevalent in educator evaluation systems, many question how those ratings actually help teachers improve their practice. i.e. “How does a level 3 teacher become a level 4 or 5?” Robust and reliable value-added data serve as a great starting point for teachers
For once it seems I’m able to admire Angelina Jolie with my wife’s approval. You see, it was the discovery of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are responsible for breast cancer, which inspired my wife to take an MSc in Science Communications. She wanted to take science out of
Editor's Note: My 8th grade son, David, created a poster that he submitted to the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The competition encourages students to display "two or more related graphics that summarize a set of data, look at the data from different points of view, and answer specific questions about
The graphs produced by the SG procedures (and GTL) have a default look and feel designed for the common use cases. However, everyone has a preference for some special features that make the graphs unique. Fortunately, extensive customizations can be made to graphs produced by these tools using statement and
In my quest to address the opportunity of big data for marketers, I've had a chance to collaborate recently with Tamara Dull, a colleague who's an expert in this field and who is also super-creative. Perfect for marketing, right? Well, she developed a concept she calls "The Big Data Archipelago,"
John Taylor likes computer data the way he likes big trout: here, there or anywhere. Which is perfectly natural, considering he’s the data analyst in the Inland Fisheries Department at Texas Parks and Wildlife. Taylor describes his unspoiled enthusiasm for big data and big fish in this sendup of Dr. Seuss that
Back in 2011, I wrote about the all new SAS Framework Data Server in 9.3 and how it needs to be running for certain web applications to function properly. But it is actually used as the data storage device for multiple SAS components including webdav content, alerts, comments, and workflows.
According to the recent 2013 Marketing Performance Management Survey by Forrester, ITSMA and VisionEdge, marketers still have a long way to go. To be relevant to the business, marketers need to measure and communicate the right metrics. Surprisingly, just 40 percent of marketers today think that measuring marketing’s contribution to
Welcome to my new blog series Data Preparation (DP) and Data Quality (DQ) on the road. The main actors here are my two SAS books Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS and Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS, which are allowed to accompany me to many conferences, SAS events, and
People take SAS Training courses for a variety of reasons. Dr. John Taylor puts the skills he learns in the classroom to work at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Office. As you’ll see in this entertaining video, Taylor has a passion for big data and big trout. “An unexpected
There is lot of talk at the moment about data analysts or data scientists, but what do you need to be successful in these roles and what type of person do you need to be? The stereotypical view is that we’re ‘a bit nerdy’ and ‘walk around in white coats’,
With the medical science these days, there are many genetic defects you can be tested for, to see if you might develop a certain problem/disease, or might be a carrier for it. Would you rather know, or not know? (Would your health insurance company rather know, or not know?) These
If you're a software developer, you're probably already familiar with these terms: I18N and L10N. Internationalization (I + 18 letters + N = I18N) The discipline of preparing your software to run correctly in different languages with different culture settings. For example, the software must be able to accommodate multibyte
My headlines for Honduras were not like the frightening ones that we often see in the news. My headlines include the beauty of the people I met, the children I grew to know, and the country I experienced. I went to Honduras with a group from Cincinnati, Ohio to spend
The Empirical Evidence Steve Morlidge presents results from two test datasets (the first with high levels of manual intervention, the second with intermittent demand patterns), intended to challenge the robustness of the avoidability principle. The first dataset contained one year of weekly forecasts for 124 product SKUs at a fast-moving consumer
Every once in a while I stop for a moment and consider how radically different marketing is today compared with just 3 years ago. Looking no further than my desk, it's quite amazing how my job has changed in just that short period of time. Previously, marketing seemed more an art
My previous post described the multinomial distribution and showed how to generate random data from the multinomial distribution in SAS by using the RANDMULTINOMIAL function in SAS/IML software. The RANDMULTINOMIAL function is simple to use and implements an efficient algorithm called the sequential conditional marginal method (see Gentle (2003), p.
Suppose we have a perfect forecasting algorithm. This means that we know the "rule" guiding the behavior we are forecasting (i.e., we know the signal), and we have properly expressed the rule in our forecasting algorithm. As long as the rule governing the behavior doesn't change in the future, then any
With the pervasiveness of mobile devices, being able to read while “on the go” has been easier than ever. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you pass the time waiting by reading something on your phone/iPad/tablet etc? With eBooks on my iPad, I find that
Stellen Sie sich vor, Sie sind der CEO eines weltweit operierenden Unternehmens und finden in einem Benchmark heraus, dass Ihre Wettbewerber stärker wachsen als Sie. Deshalb starten Sie eine Analytics-Strategie, stellen einen Datenanalysten an, nennen ihn Data Scientist (so heißt das nämlich heute) und bitten ihn, analytisch optimierte Marketingkampagnen zu
I don’t want to have a relationship with a marketing department. I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want to engage in conversation with you. I feel no loyalty towards you. When I say I like you I’m not entirely sincere. And yet I chose to share an enormous amount of my life with
