Police Departments across the country are under constant scrutiny by elected officials, the media and the public to reduce crime, control costs, engage the public, always be accessible and, most important, always be courteous and professional. Police departments that demonstrate excellence in these areas can achieve accreditation by The Commission
Fractals. If you grew up in the 1980s or '90s and were interested in math and computers, chances are you played with computer generation of fractals. Who knows how many hours of computer time was spent computing Mandelbrot sets and Julia sets to ever-increasing resolutions? When I was a kid,
There’s a new video series launching in the SAS Education department unlike anything that’s ever been done before. It’s called Stat Wars. Here’s how it works… two SAS instructors go head-to-head and battle it out over a statistics challenge. (So far no injuries have been reported.) It’s educational and engaging,
Naomi Robbins has posted a contest, part 1 of which is to submit alternative representations for the following graph: Clearly, usage of two pie charts to represent the share of the B2B and B2C referrals will invite many responses. To create the graph, I took the data shown in the Pie Charts themselves, so we are using percent
This week's SAS tip is from Phil Mason and his ever-popular book In the Know...SAS Tips and Techniques From Around the Globe, Second Edition. In a review, SAS user Ian Whitlock said "Phil Mason is the grand master in the art of the SAS software tip." It was definitely difficult picking just one excerpt to
Several years ago my mom, bless her heart, bought a cell phone. Now, my mom is not what one would call “tech-savvy”. She has had the same car forever, same furniture for 25 years (well, she did get it reupholstered), even the same pots and pans that came as wedding
Many new books topped the charts at NESUG, SESUG, SCSUG, and Analytics 2012. Did any of your go-to SAS books make the lists? If you’re curious, take a look at our previously featured post What SAS users are reading this fall: early book buzz to view bestselling titles at these
As rain settles in over the green fields of England, I’ve been reading the Times Higher Education (THE) periodical. It’s always a lively read, as it invariably takes the part of untenured junior lecturers in any dispute. It is also very well researched and informed. This week’s THE edition has
While I'm waiting for the next "data intense" event to show up in the news (so I can blog some SAS graphs about it), I thought I'd share a few fun SAS graphs in the spirit of the holiday season! Please don't hold me to too high of graphical "best practices"
In a recent article on efficient simulation from a truncated distribution, I wrote some SAS/IML code that used the LOC function to find and exclude observations that satisfy some criterion. Some readers came up with an alternative algorithm that uses the REMOVE function instead of subscripts. I remarked in a
Read David Loshin's latest blog post: Understanding Sequences of Events.
I live in the South, but was raised by Midwestern Catholics from rural Minnesota. Think Jeff Foxworthy meets Fargo. A few of the great things that I have learned about folks in the South is their incredible politeness even when they are really saying, "Wow, what in the world are
Independent contractor. Two very simple words that have a dramatic impact on businesses, workers, and government programs. While most people have a basic understanding of the term, they often have very little understanding of the laws governing it, which vary significantly program by program and state by state. This has
It seemed like an easy task. A SAS user asked me how to use the SGPLOT procedure to create a bar chart where the vertical axis shows percentages instead of counts. I assumed that there was some simple option that would change the scale of the vertical axis from counts
This week's SAS tip is from Carol Matthews and Brian Shilling's book Validating Clinical Trial Data Reporting with SAS. Written for SAS programmers, this engaging guide contains many hands-on tips--including the featured excerpt below. The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Carol Matthews and Brian Shilling's book "Validating Clinical Trial Data Reporting with SAS"
There are two activities which, when taken in combination, have occupied the vast majority of my working hours for the past 20 years: writing computer programs and writing...well, just writing. During my college years I completed my degree with a double-major: Computer Science and English. (My English degree has a
Blogger Dylan Jones offers 3 tips for more effective data profiling.
We've been busy this year producing books for SAS users. Take a look at our Upcoming Titles list. These are just a few of the titles we have going right now. You've seen me promote specific topics throughout the year. Now is your chance to tell me where your experience
If you haven’t heard of an APCD, it’s one of those acronyms you need to know. All-Payer Claims Databases are simply databases that consist of claims data from all health care payers in a given state. This includes private payers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, and public payers such
Frequently someone will post a question to the SAS Support Community that says something like this: I am trying to do [statistical task]and SAS issues an error and reports that my correlation matrix is not positive definite. What is going on and how can I complete [the task]? The statistical
David Sedaris, a native of Raleigh, NC, who has made it big as a humorist and author, recently posted his “Ideal Bookshelf” on Facebook. The picture was created by a company called Ideal Bookshelf, which “paints portraits of people through the spines of their favorite books: the ones that changed
Several weeks ago, South Carolina was the victim of what some experts believe to be the largest cyber-attack against a state tax department in history. Approximately 3.6 million personal South Carolina income tax returns were exposed, and nearly 657,000 businesses compromised, in an international hacking attack. Coincidentally, SAS and the SC
Last week I wrote about using acceptance-rejection algorithms in vector languages to simulate data. The main point I made is that in a vector language it is efficient to generate many more variates than are needed, with the knowledge that a certain proportion will be rejected. In last week's article,
This week's SAS tip is from Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche's bestselling The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. Susan and Lora are revered in the user community. And their work continues to help SAS users throughout the world. I hope you'll also find value in this week's excerpt. The following excerpt is from
Data governance as an MDM program planning task, part 2.
The ODS DOCUMENT and the DOCUMENT procedure give you the ability to save ODS output. Once saved, you can print that same work, as many times as you want, to any ODS destination. But what does this mean for you? With PROC DOCUMENT, you can: Make changes to the appearance
Have you heard the expression "Talk Turkey"? Well then, what better (tongue-in-cheek) thing to do around the Thanksgiving holiday, than talk some turkey using SAS Graphs! ;) I don't usually decorate my graphs with images and pictures (they typically make the graph more difficult to read), but when it comes
The LOC function is one of the most important functions in the SAS/IML language. The LOC function finds elements of a vector or matrix that satisfy some condition. For example, if you are going to apply a logarithmic transform to data, you can use the LOC function to find all
Most custom tasks need to access SAS data in some way. Since custom tasks are built using Microsoft .NET, and the .NET Framework is object-oriented, it would be convenient if we had an object-oriented method for navigating SAS data sources. That was the thinking behind the "SasData"-namespace classes within the
