By and large, marketers are an optimistic lot. We're often big extroverts with big ideas, laying grand plans and generally having a good time along the way. Our view of the future is usually rosy, with all sorts of reasons to hope for the best and reach for the stars.
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
When SAS CEO Jim Goodnight talks about the development of SAS High-Performance Analytics, he always starts with the customer. After all, it was banking customer UOB in Singapore that first approached Goodnight three years ago about reducing the time it took to calculate risk factors on the bank's full portfolio.
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
The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually interesting graphics for the general public. However, because their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
Andy Pulkstenis of State Farm thinks it is, stating that this red-headed stepchild among modeling technques is where predictive modeling was ten years ago. He opened his talk, "Do You Know or Do You Think You Know? Creating a Testing Culture at State Farm," at the A2012 conference in Las Vegas with
This week's SAS tip comes from Frederick Pratter and his book Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition. Frederick's book contains a wealth of good information, including the following excerpt. The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Frederick Pratter and his book "Web Development with SAS by Example,
You've all heard about the recent meningitis outbreak, right? Being a data-guy and a map-guy, I went looking for maps related to the outbreak. I found the following map on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It shows the states that received the recalled drug used in epidurals (for back
Over the last decade, five companies have emerged with the potential to aggressively reshape the landscape of multiple industries – and to change life as we know it. They are the "Tech Titans:" Amazon, Apple, eBay , Facebook and Google. Collectively, these five companies are worth more than a trillion dollars. Their
Sunny days, keeping the clouds away, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?? Oops, sorry, was just day dreaming about younger days and the magic of an eight foot talking yellow bird. How great was Sesame Street? I learned counting, my abc’s, sharing, diversity,
The Premier Business Leadership Series (PBLS) was in full swing on day one with the astute and provocative keynote address, "Prosperity at Risk," by the prolific Michael E. Porter, an internationally known competitive strategist and professor at the Harvard Business School. His tome On Competition is a resourceful compendium for the
The Analytics conference has just concluded and the unofficial theme of the final day was Big Data. It began with our very first talk, a keynote presentation delivered by Will Hakes, CEO and co-founder of Link Analytics. Will spent the first part of his talk outlining the current state of
What's the difference between data mining, forecasting and optimization? When should you use each technique, and how do they interact? Jeremy TerBush, Vice President of Global Analytics, Wyndham Exchange and Rentals explains that he uses all techniques together in an overall predictive process. "Data mining is first step in the system,"
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 - Portland - San Jose - Indianapolis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As I prepare for my stint on the SAS Programming "Roadshow," it occurs to
The challenge of "big data" is well recognized as multi-faceted in terms of its Volume, Variety and Velocity, and SAS has had a roughly 35-year head start on the rest of the industry in dealing with it. Our solutions are dyed-in-the-wool to address the "3 V's" of big data, in
Last week I wrote a SAS/IML program that computes the odds of winning the game of craps. I noted that the program remains valid even if the dice are not fair. For convenience, here is a SAS/IML function that computes the probability of winning at craps, given the probability vector
Bill Hakes, CEO and Co-founder of Link Analytics, is on a mission to get people excited about big data and big data analytics. Speaking to a room full of statisticians, analysts and mathematicians at the Analytics 2012 conference in Vegas, he says, “Our mission should be to get the marketers,
Books are anything but boring in Las Vegas. Just ask Stacey Hamilton and Lisanne Roskam, who’ve spent the past two days in the SAS bookstore at Analytics 2012. Despite their hectic pace, I managed to track down a few conference highlights from Stacey (a developmental editor for SAS Press—and a runner) this
In my recent work for updates and changes to the SAS 9.4 OLAP Server documentation, I documented a new OLAP Server procedure that can be extremely useful to our customers. The function has been available for internal use but will become available to customers in SAS 9.4. The OLAPCONTENTS procedure
You might know about the many automatic macro variables that are available in SAS. They provide plenty of information about the SAS environment, such as the current user (SYSUSERID), the SAS version (SYSVER and SASVLONG), and the operating system where SAS is running (SYSCP and SYSCPL). That information is often
What does “big data” really mean? If you ask Zubin Dowlaty, he will tell you it’s a metaphor for disruption. “I have never experienced anything like what we are experiencing in the industry right now,” he says. Dowlaty is VP and Head of Innovation & Development at Mu-Sigma Inc. In the past he has
As SLG’s health policy specialist, I’m chartered with developing novel ways to apply data analytics to our state government health systems. If you ask me, it’s the perfect blend of technology and policy - two of my favorite things. However, I sometimes find it challenging to identify the areas within
Don't give up on the dating game. Just because there is no prompt type specifically for dates, it can still be accomplished with some stored process matchmaking. BI Dashboard offers a dynamic prompt indicator which provides the ultimate flexibility in developing prompt based reports and dashboards. The dynamic prompt indicator
It is easy to simulate data that is uniformly distributed in the unit cube for any dimension. However, it is less obvious how to generate data in the unit simplex. The simplex is the set of points (x1,x2,...,xd) such that Σi xi = 1 and 0 ≤ xi ≤ 1
A year ago I set out to periodically blog from my perspective of leading R&D for our advanced analytics software. I invited SAS colleagues who also work in various areas of advanced analytics to blog on their own interesting conversations with each other and with customers about the intersection of
In a recent blog post, I discussed how I enjoy working with the education industry because they are so eager and willing to help. While that post dealt with K-12, this one discusses higher education, specifically the University of Texas System and their public dashboard. If you are interested in
SAS/GRAPH gives you the ability to customize your graphs (or even create totally new types of custom graphs) ... and it is my firm belief that it gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to "make sense" of your data in ways your competitors can't. Most of the examples in
I vividly remember the process of changing TV channels when I was a kid. Turn the channel select knob, turn a dial to rotate the antenna, then make fine adjustments to tune in the channel. This process usually resulted in an adequate picture, but it required considerable effort, the quality
SAS partners always bring valueable thought-leadership and industry perspectives to customer at events like Analytics 2012 and The Premier Business Leadership Series. Joining Deloitte and Teradata to talk about big data opportunities and trends is Jarrod Vawdrey, data scientist with Greenplum, a division of EMC. Vawdrey will be hosting one of
