We have come very far in our journey to 10 best practices from education customer for information management, reporting and analytics. We are up to Best Practice #9: Empower Users by Providing Training and Self-Help Materials. Most education professionals will need training in order to understand data, reports and analytics.
As you might expect, blogging is a lot like many other skills – you have to work at it over time before you start to see improvements. Blogging does not at all come naturally to me, so it’s a personal goal of mine to keep working at it until I
When I need to graph a function of two variables, I often choose to use a contour plot. A surface plot is probably easier for many people to understand, but it has several disadvantages when compared to a contour plot. For example, the following statements in SAS/IML Studio displays a
If you communicate with an international audience, this tip is for you. John Kohl is a gifted linguistic engineer, technical writer and editor, and author of the award-winning The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. At the beginning of the book, John introduces The Cardinal
Recently, there has been a lot of noise around the beltway about "big data" and analytics, and what it means for government. Last week, SAS hosted the 11th Annual Government Executive Leadership Summit which focused on exploring that very subject. Held at the Newseum in downtown D.C., the event attracted
I received the following query regarding the RAND function in Base SAS: In SAS, is specifying 0 as a random number seed the same as not specifying a seed at all? The question concerns initializing the SAS random number stream by using the internal system clock. You can do this
We've all heard of her. A little blond girl with a penchant for trespassing, and very finicky preferences in mattresses and breakfast food. Unfortunately, Goldilocks isn't just part of a fairy tale, she is alive, well, and causing havoc throughout government. If you haven't made the connection yet, "bear" with
SAS takes pride in the award-winning documentation we produce. From books to on-line help to embedded user assistance, we deliver the words that help our users understand how to use SAS software. However, as SAS applications and interfaces have become more sophisticated and interactive, it’s become more difficult to convey
In 2011-2012, North Carolina became one of many states to restructure their educator evaluation system to incorporate student growth. The NC Department of Public Instruction commissioned the external expertise of WestEd to evaluate various growth models and recommend value-added technology that would help them best meet their mission of using meaningful evaluation to
I often use the SAS/IML language for simulating data with certain known properties. In fact, I'm writing a book called Simulating Data with SAS. When I simulate repeated measurements (sometimes called replicated data), I often want to generate an ID variable that identifies which measurement is associated with which subject
We just published Gerhard Svolba’s Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS. When I first heard about it, I thought we’d have a tome covering such topics as standardizing data, cleaning it up, removing duplicates, and so on. However, as Gerhard says in his Introduction, “There are many aspects of data
The Swiss army knife is known for its versatility, with a variety of tools and blades to help you complete the task at hand. When you are creating graphics, you sometimes have a special feature you want to add, but you can't seem to find the right syntax "tool" to
No matter what statistical programming language you use, be careful of testing for an exact value of a floating-point number. This is known in the world of numerical analysis as "10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0" (Kernighan and Plauger, 1974, The Elements of Programming Style). There are many examples
The Supreme Court of the United States is set to reveal its ruling on the landmark health care legislation known as the Affordable Care Act. Much angst has resulted from this law and many parties that feel obliged to support or criticize the law have prepared statements, and in some
This week's SAS tip comes from Michele Burlew and her book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Second Edition. Michele is the accomplished author of 7 SAS Press books and a much-respected SAS expert. You can learn more about Michele and read a free chapter from each of her books here. And if you like
A reader wrote for help with a computational problem. He has a vector of length N and the vector contains integer values in the range [1, 120], which represent months for which events occurred over a 10-year period. The question is: what is the 24-month period for which the most
My first thoughts on hearing that we’d be bringing out a new edition of JMP Start Statistics were, “But how do we improve on an already great book? What could be better?” JMP Start Statistics has been such a big success with JMP users for a long time, so the authors
So are you now dreaming big? Coming up with other ideas for how SAS Stored Processes can be leveraged in your installation of SAS? As I mentioned in last week's post, you could use OLAP cubes as a data source for your SAS Stored Process. Here is how I would
This is a third post on newspaper stories that I recently read. Today's post deals with science, politics, and rising sea levels. Incidentally, the title is a blatant reference to John Allen Paulos's brilliant book, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. Senate approves law that challenges sea-level science The NC legislature
Don’t miss this list of most sought after books at PharmaSUG 2012. Last month’s conference featured several presentations from SAS authors and many of their books, along with industry-specific titles, were highly popular with attendees. The top 10 (in no particular order): Carpenter's Guide to Innovative SAS Techniques by Art
Clarence So, Chief Strategy Officer for Salesforce.com, opened last month’s Chief Strategy Officer Summit in San Francisco (by the IE Group) with a challenging statement: ‘Your strategy is nothing more than the sum of your tactics’. I found this to be less than satisfactory as an explanation, but considering the
One of my new work friends says this frequently. But the statement is lost in his translation from Portuguese, it is not that he does not believe me, it is just that he has questions about how things happen so he can learn. I debate on which version of this
This is my second post on some newspaper articles that I recently read. Today's post deals with academic fraud. Questions linger in academic fraud case Over the past year, the News and Observer has occasionally reported on a scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in which
One of the most frequently asked questions we get in Publications is “I’m new to SAS. How do I get started?” We can always help with an answer to the question, but to do so we need to learn a little more about your plans for using SAS. Do you
This past weekend was Father's Day, so I took some time to relax and read the newspaper. I found several stories that suggested interesting statistical questions. Unfortunately, the data are not available for analysis. Nevertheless, the stories are worth sharing. Over the next few days, I'll post my thoughts on
Michael Mandelbaum posed the question in the title of this post to a capacity crowd at last week's SAS Government Leadership Summit. Author of That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Mandelbaum gave the opening keynote address. Mandelbaum posited
Wizard Harry Potter makes magic just waving his wand around and shouting out spells. Using SAS Enterprise Guide (and you are welcome to shout out your own commands too) you can create some magic, allowing the Stored Process Wizard to code for you. On Step 2, the "Include code for"
To celebrate special occasions like Father's Day, I like to relax with a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. When I looked at the weather page, I was astonished by the seeming uniformity of temperatures across the contiguous US. The weather map in my newspaper was almost entirely yellow
I had a chance to attend a moderated panel discussion at the last SAS Global Forum Executive Conference with executives from Best Buy, Seminole Gaming and Office Depot, and each speaker offered their own unique story about how applied customer analytics makes a difference in marketing. I captured some key points in previous
In the video below, you'll hear a great explanation from SAS CTO Keith Collins about the benefits of high-performance analytics, and why it's not just about getting answers faster. He also tells interviewer Karin Reed which SAS procedures are being optimized for high-performance analytics and provides up dates about big
