A few weeks ago, in Northern Virginia, a 30 foot highway sign fell onto I-66 and landed on a passing pickup truck. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but it drew media attention and caused motorists in the area to wonder about the safety of other signs and the transportation network
In a recent blog post, we received a comment that, while the Kindle was a favorite eReading device, it wasn’t the choice for technical material. Honestly, this is something we’ve wondered about! We’re seeing that eBooks are becoming more and more popular with SAS users. But, are these books being
There is something that 90% of us admit to doing, and the other 10% will lie about. That, of course, is Googling yourself. As an avid follower of myself, and everything I do, I look forward to a weekly Google Alert that tells me all about what I've been up to.
SAS Global Forum 2012 is fast approaching and attendees want to make sure they make the most of their time away from their job. In addition to the opportunity to network with thousands of SAS professionals, attend hands-on workshops and demonstrations and choose from more than 300 paper presentations, attendees
After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer's internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special
Most statistical programmers have seen a graph of a normal distribution that approximates a binomial distribution. The figure is often accompanied by a statement that gives guidelines for when the approximation is valid. For example, if the binomial distribution describes an experiment with n trials and the probability of success
Did you oversleep this morning? If you live in the United States of America, Monday morning seems to have arrived just a bit earlier, accompanied by a bit more "dark" than usual. That's because as good time-fearing citizens, we have all set our clocks ahead by one hour so as
SAS provides several ways to compute sample quantiles of data. The UNIVARIATE procedure can compute quantiles (also called percentiles), but you can also compute them in the SAS/IML language. Prior to SAS/IML 9.22 (released in 2010) statistical programmers could call a SAS/IML module that computes sample quantiles. With the release
This week's tip comes from three authors who've made a big impact within the SAS user community. Lauren Haworth, Cynthia Zender, and Michele Burlew partnered up to write Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond a couple of years ago-and their book remains a bestselling go-to guide for anyone wanting to learn more about ODS.
In the United States, this upcoming weekend is when we turn our clocks forward one hour as we adopt daylight saving time. (Some people will also flip their mattresses this weekend!) Daylight saving time (DST) in the US begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first
Apparently the prolonged use of OxyContin will give you a pompous and surley demeanor, and make you say a lot of really ignorant things. So I implore you, dear readers, to withhold your use of such a substance, preserve your good attitude and brain cells, and participate in a research study
A few years ago I had the privilege of presenting the last technical paper at SAS Global Forum. This year, conference chair Andy Kuligowski asked me to go one better than that, and present a talk at the official Closing Session. What will I talk about? That's a mystery (maybe
During IFSUG yesterday, Sunil Gupta gave attendees to his presentation a special homework assignment. Look into the SAS Enterprise Guide task 'Characterize Data'. Sunil suggested that this was a simple approach to quickly getting a summary of all the variables within your data table. Of course, some programmers will use
I work with continuous distributions more often than with discrete distributions. Consequently, I am used to thinking of the quantile function as being an inverse cumulative distribution function (CDF). (These functions are described in my article, "Four essential functions for statistical programmers.") For discrete distributions, they are not. To quote
Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated
Bill Franks knows a thing or two about big data. As Chief Analytics Officer at Teradata, Franks works to help determine the right strategies and positioning for his company in the advanced analytics space. Franks has taken his knowledge and written a book that answers questions such as: What is
At the IFSUG conference this week in Cary, NC I met Stephen Harris from Bank of America. Stephen gave the talk "Manage Your Partners Before You Manage Your Dashboards: Designing Great Dashboards" covering the business aspects of successfully implementing dashboards. When you back up for a second to consider the
The next time you write a DATA step, try to express it in iambic pentameter. Or instead of a SAS macro function, how about a SAS macro sonnet? (Or, for the more base among you, a limerick?) That's the spirit behind the code {poems} project. You write a poem in
We just returned from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference with renewed excitement around ideas for SAS Press projects! The Tools of Change conference provides a forum through which publishers, authors, and publishing services organizations discuss issues and ideas around transforming the publishing industry from being primarily print-focused to delivering content
As a SAS developer, I am always looking ahead to the next release of SAS. However, many SAS customer sites migrate to new releases slowly and are just now adopting versions of SAS that were released in 2010 or 2011. Consequently, I want to write a few articles that discuss
I've blogged several times about multivariate normality, including how to generate random values from a multivariate normal distribution. But given a set of multivariate data, how can you determine if it is likely to have come from a multivariate normal distribution? The answer, of course, is to run a goodness-of-fit
About once a month, a customer approaches SAS and asks a question of significance. By "significance", I don't necessarily mean "of great importance", but instead I mean "of how SAS handles large numbers, or floating-point values with many significant digits". In response, we always first ask why they asked. This
In the previous post, “Roses are red, violets are blue…”, I discussed the general problem of getting style attributes to line up with specific group values and some ways to overcome the problem. In this installment, I want to elaborate on the attribute map functionality in the Graph Template Language
Sometimes in matrix computations you need to obtain the values of certain submatrices such as the diagonal elements or the super- or subdiagonal elements. About a year ago, I showed one way to do that: convert subscripts to indices and vice-versa. However, a tip from @RLangTip on Twitter got me
Three is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4. Earth is the third planet in its local Solar System. Humans perceive white light as the mixture of the three additive primary hues: red, green, and blue. Genetic information is encoded in DNA and RNA using a triplet codon system.
As a Master Chief in US Navy submarines, one of my favorite sayings was “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment.” I've always had difficulty solidly learning new programming techniques in a traditional classroom. The new techniques and theories I've learned don’t really take root until I've used them to solve
Neil Constable is a Principal Education Consultant at SAS in the United Kingdom, where he applies his extensive knowledge of Base SAS, SAS Enterprise Guide, and the SAS business intelligence tools. He's also the author of SAS Programming for Enterprise Guide Users, Second Edition--and this week's featured tip. You can get to know Neil
This question came up while helping my presales colleague with a client’s question: “Is Microsoft Excel in direct competition with SAS?” Not really. I like to think of SAS as partnering with Excel. Because of the following Excel benefits and its synergy with SAS. Excel has been around for years.
I recently saw a SAS Knowledge Base article called "How to stop processing your code if a certain condition is met." The article discusses the use of the %RETURN macro statement to abort the execution of a SAS program if some condition occurs. The "condition" is usually an error that
Well, we can't really afford to give everyone a free copy of the Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples. But copies will be presented to two randomly selected participants of today's AllAnalytics.com eChat! Then you can be a part of the celebrations! Yes, that's right! People have been
