Have you ever wanted to run a sample program from the SAS documentation or wanted to use a data set that appears in the SAS documentation? You can: all programs and data sets in the documentation are distributed with SAS, you just have to know where to look! Sample data
Have you noticed the annoying stock art they put on The BFD blog header? All I can think of is "If those idiots only used SAS Forecast Server, they wouldn't have to draw graphs all over their window panes just to do forecasting." It must really p.o. the housekeeping staff at that
Interested in saving 10% on books about rodents today? You’ve come to the right place. No, SAS Publishing isn’t making this discount (or any books about rodents) available, but I have scoped out some of today’s best publishing related tweets (announcements). If you’re not using Twitter (yet) or even think
My colleague, Steve Serrao, just published a blog post on the proliferation of varied law enforcement approaches and their related phraseologies. After reading, I concur – hence, this blog’s title. I am not a huge fan of the term “predictive policing”. While others may love it and live it, and
We call it the "metadata profile", but really it's like a telephone number that connects you to your SAS environment. Just as a telephone number has component parts (country code, area code, exchange), the metadata profile contains information that allow you to "dial in" to your SAS servers. This information
In two previous blog posts I worked through examples in the survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. Robust estimates of location in a univariate setting are well-known, with the median statistic being the classical example. Robust estimates of scale are less well-known, with
Multiple Comparisons and Multiple Tests Using SAS, Second Edition by Peter H. Westfall, Randall D. Tobias, and Russell D. Wolfinger was one of our most anticipated books of 2011. And this week's SAS author's tip comes from this impressive 600+ page resource (from 3 really impressive authors). If you get a chance, you should pick up
Recently I've made several online purchases buying eBooks for the new Amazon Kindle my daughter received as a holiday gift. The online checkout process is very straight-forward, especially with the 'Continue' buttons that change to a 'Place your order' button on the final step. Did you know that the same
The other day I encountered the following SAS DATA step for generating three normally distributed variables. Study it, and see if you can discover what is unnecessary (and misleading!) about this program: data points; drop i; do i=1 to 10; x=rannor(34343); y=rannor(12345); z=rannor(54321); output; end; run; The program creates the
Recently, I had a discussion with a user concerning the volume of imagemap data generated for an interactive, web-based visual contain a large number of graphs. The large amount of imagemap data was causing problems with the current version of their web browser. The graphs consisted of either bar charts
Ten years ago I spent some time in women's undergarments*, as Director of Forecasting at Sara Lee Intimate Apparel (now Hanesbrands). Sure, it sounds glamorous -- product posters on our office walls, quarterly runway shows of new products, and partying with the full-figured Playtex models (some of whom were fuller than I figured).
This week's tip comes from Michael Raithel and his timeless book The Complete Guide to SAS Indexes. There are many superlatives that can be used to describe Michael. His enthusiasm for SAS (and life) and ability to really connect with users when sharing his expertise is inspiring. If you've attended one (or more) of Michael's many conference talks,
So many of us struggle with this mountain. In fact, 68.27% of us get within sight of reaching the summit (while 95.47% of us are at least on a perceivable slope). We run, walk, crawl and sometimes slide our way uphill (from one direction or the other) until we finally
When developing content in SAS BI Dashboard, such as indicators, ranges, and dashboards, knowing how to name them is pretty important. If changes are required later (for instance to improve the administrators capability of partial promoting content) much more work is required to ensure the links between the objects isn't
In a previous blog post on robust estimation of location, I worked through some of the examples in the survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. I showed that SAS/IML software and PROC UNIVARIATE both support the robust estimators of location that are mentioned
In a unique partnership that builds on the cutting edge business knowledge of SAS and the extensive publishing experience of Wiley, SAS Publishing and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. joined forces to create The Wiley and SAS Business Series. Titles in this series address key issues such as analytics, forecasting,
We’ve just published Chris Olsen’s Teaching Elementary Statistics with JMP, which offers the latest research on best practices and how JMP can facilitate teaching statistics. To mark the book’s publication, we asked Chris to tell us the top three things every elementary statistics student should know. Statistics is about numbers
Love can make a person do bad, dangerous, stupid, and irresponsible things. Love of country can make a politician stray from his wife. Love of Pepsi can make a pop musician lose his hair in a pyrotechnics-gone-bad commercial. Love of acting can make academy award winners accept starring roles in Ishtar. And for
As many of you have already noticed, my LinkedIn profile and the blog profile blurb have changed. I took on an exciting new job in the SAS Solutions OnDemand team. The official title is Software Development Manager, but what I really do is lead a team of fraud solution architects.
Note: as this is a popular topic, I've added a few notes with minor updates, including a link to a popular how-to tutorial video. In case you missed it, the first maintenance release for SAS 9.3 was recently released. Because we're all friends here, you may call it "SAS 9.3M1"
I was on vacation when a family member sidled up to me. "Rick, you're a statistician..." he began. I knew I was in trouble. He proceeded to tell me the story of Joseph "Newsboy" Moriarty, a New Jersey mobster who rose to prominence and became known as the bookie who
The single most costly employee benefit for any organization is health insurance, and the price is going up. From 2003-2009, the costs per hour worked for employee health insurance increased from $1.03 to $2.00. These costs continue to increase from 5%-7% per year. The reality is that employee health insurance costs will continue
Many cities and counties are taking the lead of private industry and developing 311 call centers to consolidate incoming calls for service and information requests from citizens. The business advantages are clear: Citizens have one number to call for service and information rather than having to waste time searching for
All too often an unspeakable tragedy leads to a needed policy or operational change through a newly-realized criminal justice system gap. While we continually work to minimize existing gaps, the reality is that as law enforcement evolves, so does the crime and so do the criminals. In recognition of those
Statistical programmers often need mathematical constants such as π (3.14159...) and e (2.71828...). Programmers of numerical algorithms often need to know machine-specific constants such as the machine precision constant (2.22E-16 on my Windows PC) or the largest representable double-precision value (1.798E308 on my Windows PC). Some computer languages build these
Yesterday, FORTUNE Magazine ranked SAS the #3 best company to work for in U.S. There was a palpable buzz all day around the Cary campus and on social media channels (if you’re on Twitter, search on the hashtag #ILoveSAS). It’s admittedly exciting working for a company that is consistently and
I encountered a wonderful survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. Not only are the authors major contributors to the field of robust estimation, but the article is short and very readable. This blog post walks through the examples in the paper and shows
This morning I logged onto my e-mail at 6:45 AM to learn that SAS was ranked as the No. 3 Best Company to Work For. No. 3 is not as high as No. 1. But it's very, very close. Perhaps even barely distinguishable, in the larger scheme of things. I
An issue that SAS/GRAPH users have wrestled with in the past has been how to put tick marks at irregular intervals on their axes. In PROC GPLOT, if you specify irregular intervals using the ORDER option on the AXIS statement, the procedure’s axis kicks into a “discrete” mode, where the
The Winter 2012 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman's preview: --------------------------- Our last two issues featured Steve Morlidge’s Guiding Principles for managing an organization’s forecasting process. You can see the summary table of these principles on page 31. With this issue, we continue their development
