“Frankenstorm” is what the U.S. National Weather Service is calling the combination of Hurricane Sandy, an early winter storm heading east, and a blast of arctic air from the North. SAS headquarters is located in the middle of the U.S. east coast ... and we barely missed being the bulls-eye for this
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
Businesses can no longer ignore the importance of social networking and social capabilities as part of their enterprise applications. According to a Forrester survey of 200 U.S. companies, social listening and digital engagement can influence customer perception (58%) and building long-term relationships with customers (56%). While social media can amplify
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
“We may not see it but math is everywhere around us,” says Paul T. Savarese, Technical Support Statistician at SAS. You don’t have to be a statistician to enjoy this interview, in which Savarese discusses target shooting, Jay Leno and Guinness beer – and ties it all back to the fascinating subject
I recently talked with the director of analytic operations at a large office supply retailer who explained that his group is often approached with broad questions that they investigate historically and descriptively to help figure out where to go next. The broad questions often lead the retailer to learn things
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
If you're like me, you hate all those pop-ups you get suggesting (or sometimes forcing) that you install an upgrade such as Windows, Java, browsers, phone apps, etc, etc. And quite often they don't convince you why you'd want to upgrade (will life be better?) ... they just tell you to
So this is my first blog entry relating to my book Customer Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner, Second Edition. If you’ve read or are reading my book, I sincerely hope it aids in your understanding of your customers, clients, patients, etc. I originally wrote this book because when
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
During a recent presentation on performance management I had an audience member ask me if perhaps I had minored in cynicism along with my degree in finance. I replied that, with the science, psychology and philosophy I’d taken, I probably had minored in skepticism, but that the cynicism came later,
I asked a Nuclear Engineering Professor friend of mine, after the Fukushima power plant disaster of March 2011, whether that incident would have a positive or a negative impact on his industry. His response was that it would have a short-term positive impact as a result of publicity generating a
After installing SAS Business Intelligence, I would also suggest verifying that all is working appropriately before adding users or importing content from another machine. (My template checklist is included below.) The act of creating the content is an extremely important test (to immediately rectify issues with accessing data, or saving
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
SAS provides solutions that have analytics integrated into reports that deliver insight into what will happen in the future, not just report on what has happened in the past. Who wouldn't love that? However, what makes the SAS programming environment so useful to end users is how efficient and effective
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
Standing in my own crosshairs as my own target market means that almost all work that I do can be a learning opportunity, and going to DMA2012 was certainly a biggie. What I saw and experienced at the show reaffirmed the idea that it’s never been more exciting to be
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
We wrapped up the annual SESUG conference this week. This year was special, in that the conference was held locally near SAS world headquarters in Cary, NC. In fact, the opening session on Sunday was right here in our on-campus conference center. Conferees were able to take campus tours and
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
This week's SAS tip is from A. John Bailer and his book Statistical Programming in SAS. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association, John has been using SAS for 30 years. His expertise clearly comes through in his book. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author John Bailer and his book "Statistical Programming in SAS"
Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) explains the prediction he made about Small Data and VRM.
Program update for 2013! The SAS Training Roadshow is back on tour. This year, we’re heading out to six rockin’ cities. We’d love to see you there. Cleveland - St. Louis – Portland - San Jose - Indianapolis - Las Vegas. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In my previous post, I revealed my top
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
