Disasters like Hurricane Sandy, by and large, shine a positive light on humanity, with the heroic actions of first responders and volunteers, and the massive outpouring of support from across the nation. They also present fraud opportunities for the shady operators and criminals among us. Hurricanes leave behind a lot
The 2012 US Presidential race comes to a close today (thankfully), and there is no shortage of wacky indicators predicting the winner: Iowa Electronic Markets FiveThirtyEight PollyVote University of Colorado In primitive times a diviner could foretell the future by poisoning a chicken -- whether it lived or died provided
Read David Loshin's latest blog post: "Innovation in Creating Information Products."
In the U.S. we have a presidential election every 4 years - and as luck would have it, 2012 is an election year! I see a lot of election maps & graphs in the news, and I'm always subconsciously critiquing them in my mind and thinking to myself, "How would I graph this
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight The importance of trust in the dissemination of forecasts through an organization cannot be overstated. Lack of trust, due in no small measure to the biases arising from “silo mentalities” and misplaced incentives, can and too often does undermine the forecasting process. Foresight has
Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid's small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my "digital pack-rat" issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a project I worked 3 years
I recently encountered a SUGI30 paper by Chuck Kincaid entitled "Guidelines for Selecting the Covariance Structure in Mixed Model Analysis." I think Kincaid does a good job of describing some common covariance structures that are used in mixed models. One of the many uses for SAS/IML is as a language
We all have some sort of intuitive idea of what time series data is – it’s a bunch of measurements or observations that are marked by a time stamp – we know when the measurement was taken, as well as what was measured. This natural temporal ordering of the data
K-12 education reform and policy has seen a recent surge in the cinema with "Waiting for Superman," "The Lottery," and this fall’s "Won't Back Down.” However, if you can’t bring yourself to spend $9.00+ at the box office, or (like me) have a hard time finding babysitters to even get
The determinant of a matrix arises in many statistical computations, such as in estimating parameters that fit a distribution to multivariate data. For example, if you are using a log-likelihood function to fit a multivariate normal distribution, the formula for the log-likelihood involves the expression log(det(Σ)), where Σ is the
I work on a variety of projects at SAS, most of which require some level of team collaboration in source management systems. Due to the many technologies that we work with, SAS developers use different source management tools for different purposes. I've got projects in CVS, Subversion, and Git. When
You’ve known it, you’ve loved it. Your copy’s pages are worn, torn, or coffee-stained, and yet it’s still as beloved as ever. It’s your Little SAS Book. It belongs on every SAS programmer’s bookshelf, and it’s now even better. Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche have worked to help you improve
BASE SAS users are already familiar with the autoexec file. This is a .sas file that typically resides in the installation folder of the SAS executable. Instructions for setting it up in UNIX, Windows, and other environments is readily available on the SAS website. In SAS BI configurations there are
I was looking at some SAS documentation when I saw a Base SAS function that I never knew existed. The NWKDOM function returns the date for the nth occurrence of a weekday for the specified month and year. I surely could have used that function last spring when I blogged
This week's tip is from Professor Willbann D. Terpening and his book Statistical Analysis for Business Using JMP. If you're intrigued by the following excerpt, visit Terpening's author page for additional bonus book content. And take a look at his previously featured tip The Student t-distribution, on this blog: The following excerpt is from
Jean Paul Isson (Global Vice President of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics, Monster Worldwide, Inc.) and Jesse Harriott (Chief Analytics Officer, Constant Contact) know a thing or two about business analytics. With almost 40 years of experience between them, they've handled it all—from web mining solutions to business intelligence, predictive
What do disaster planning and baseball have in common? (Cue Cubs fans, "We plan on every season being a disaster!") Bear with me... Watching game 1 of the World Series reminded me of the time I took my son to AT&T Park to see the Giants play. It was the day
There are a lot of useful probability distributions that are not featured in standard statistical textbooks. Some of them have distinctive names. In the past year I have had contact with SAS customers who use the Tweedie distribution, the slash distribution, and the PERT distribution. Often these distributions are used
Categorical Data Analysis Using SAS has been a favorite among SAS Books readers for quite some time, both as a useful discussion of categorical data analysis techniques as well as an invaluable aid in applying these methods with SAS. Maura Stokes is lead author of the recently published third edition. I
While 2012 has been a very active hurricane season in terms of total storms, the effects on life and property have been relatively small and the need for disaster recovery less than many years. Let's all be thankful for that. Right now, Tropical Storm Sandy is threatening Jamaica and the
What's in a name? As Shakespeare's Juliet said, "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." A similar statement holds true for the names of colors in SAS: "Rose" by any other name would look as red! SAS enables you to specify a
According to the Daily Writing Tips blog, describing a thing as "somewhat unique" is bad form. Unique means "one of a kind", so either it is or it is not. The famous example (which the style police will use to chide you) is that you can't have something as "somewhat
The first step is to answer the question of what “real-time” actually means. Depending on the program and industry speed of response, I’ve heard answers that varied from milliseconds for the biggest banks in processing credit card charges to 24 hours for some government programs. A better description of what
In 2011 I came across Shaun Snapp’s blog (scmfocus.com), and immediately took a liking. In particular, I was drawn to his independent and critical tone, and a willingness to challenge the “objectivity” of many commentators and advisors in the forecasting industry. He also takes a reasoned look at the common
I’ve heard it said that the only thing you can count on in life is change. The same can be said of technology. Change is certain, and the rate of change seems to accelerate with each passing year. Change requires us to adapt, but as we race to keep up with
Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) explains the prediction he made about Small Data and VRM.
Sometimes a graph is more interpretable if you assign specific colors to categories. For example, if you are graphing the number of Olympic medals won by various countries at the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to assign the colors gold, silver, and bronze to represent first-, second-, and third-place
Living in the Washington, D.C. area I expect the morning news shows to spend a lot of time reporting on traffic. Crashes on the beltway, downed power lines delaying train service…that’s a normal day. D.C. is the most congested city, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual report.). Commuting to
I've been finishing up just a bit of the "boilerplate" content for my forthcoming book about custom tasks. One of the final tasks is to write the introduction, also known as the "About this Book" section. SAS Press offers a template with examples of a few essential topics to address
Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single
