As I make my way around the country I often have the opportunity to talk with state and local government leaders and as you can imagine, the financial crisis is the first, second and third topics on their minds. Everywhere, state and local governments are forced with painful decisions to
"Less Wrong" is the name of the blog where I found this layman's explanation of Bayes' Theorem. As I've pointed out before, I'm not a statistician. But I can comprehend basic statistical explanations such as the explanation of the Monty Hall problem. Understanding the concepts and being able to apply
I presented recently at the County Auditors Association of California annual conference. It was a packed house in Death Valley, CA, and after weathering a major sandstorm, the attendees seemed anxious to learn of the latest fraud trends in local government. Based on the questions and sidebar discussions throughout the
I've known Jim Cox for a long time. He's the SAS R&D manager for SAS Text Miner, and a gifted singer. We almost never talk about work stuff, because Jim is waaaaay too smart for me. That's why I was so pleased to discover Jim's series of blog entries about
The Results Driven Policing Conference, which was put on by the Penn State University Justice and Safety Institute and held in Baltimore recently, showcased the great performance improvements achieved by forward thinking law enforcement agencies throughout the United State and Canada. These agencies are under increasing pressure to improve public
Like any good SAS professional, I subscribe to the SAS Samples RSS feed. The other day I found this sample that shows how to create a PDF report about the contents of a SAS Information Map. It's a nice example: it shows how to use the INFOMAPS engine and ODS
The motto of SAS’ home state gets at what I hope will be a recurring theme of State and Local Connections. How can state and local governments differentiate between what seems to be and what is? How can they move beyond intuition and gut feelings to know the truth? It
As Shane reveals on his blog, your SAS session is equipped to read data that are encoded for all types of machine architectures and locales. ASCII, EBCDIC, 32- or 64-bit, English, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew: the list goes on and on. SAS accomplishes this by using a feature called Cross-Environment Data
Susan and Lora share all of the details on the OpenMic blog. (You can also see it on the SAS Publishing Facebook page.) I was pleased to have reviewed the book for technical content before it was published. As usual, Susan and Lora did a great job; they know what
Why does this SAS program produce an error? proc means data=sashelp.cars mean median min max; by origin; run; It's because SASHELP.CARS is a SAS data set, and SAS data sets observations are stored and processed sequentially, and a BY group operation requires that the observations are already grouped and sorted
Was it the economy? the timing? the location? or the brilliant and good looking Forum panel? That will be for history (or you) to decide. What we do know is that is that the Institute of Business Forecasting’s Best Practices Conference in San Francisco, April 28-30, drew a large and
Contributed by Mike Molter, Principal Statistical Programmer, INC Research I’m writing this from an altitude of 35,000 feet. As I try to squeeze my 6’1” frame into a space clearly designed for passengers no taller than 5 feet while trying to find a place to put my left elbow because
SAS catalogs have been around for a long time. Not quite as long as the Sears or L.L. Bean catalogs, but SAS customers have used catalogs to store and retrieve content for many years. A SAS catalog is a special type of SAS file that acts as a container, like
Curt Monash posted a nice summary of the current and planned offerings that help to make SAS analytics more available "in the database" -- allowing you to analyze your data quickly without having to move it around so much. If you use SAS with Teradata, Netezza, or DB2, much of
This is the topic of an 8-minute video tip from SAS Education. What's great about this tip: not only does it show you how to keep historical versions of reports and data that you create in your projects, but it also provides a nice example of cross-tab reporting in SAS
My friend Tom Reilly of Automatic Forecasting Systems posted this comment on the INFORMS discussion group on LinkedIn: Some use all of the data and some withhold data to find the best forecasting model? Withholding is arbitrary as changing the withhold from x to y means a completely different model
Contributed by Michael Harvey, Technical Writer, Publications In my previous post, I wrote that being successful as a technical writer meant being “technical” and a “writer.” I elaborated on what it meant to be “technical.” In this post, I say more about what it means to be a “writer.” As
I've just read that Sony plans to discontinue the manufacture of 3.5-inch floppy disks. [Update: a more complete tribute to the floppy disk is over on Geek News Central.] The announcement made me nostalgic for the days when we shipped The SAS System on floppies. I don't think we've done
Little SAS Book author Susan Slaughter attended SAS Global Forum this year, as she always does. She had to travel to Seattle this time to get her hands on an early copy of her own new book, The Little SAS Book for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, which she updated with
The Spring 2010 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: What’s the connection between hindsight and foresight? That is the question Paul Goodwin asks in his Hot New Research column leading off this issue. The problem is that hindsight bias – the tendency to believe
Yesterday (Monday) was an incredibly busy day for me at SAS Global Forum. It began with a successful Technical Session where SAS R&D staffers showed off: the new features coming in SAS/STAT (with the 9.22 /nine-twenty-two/ release) SAS Enterprise Miner with the Rapid Predictive Modeler (hosted in SAS Enterprise Guide
I'll leave North Carolina early on Sunday morning to head to the SAS Global Forum venue in Seattle. Through the magic of time zones, I'll be in Seattle, WA before lunchtime. I don't expect my internal clock to adjust to Pacific time right away, so I'll be awake early on
When we published the first edition of SAS For Dummies a couple of years ago, we received feedback from readers around the topic of SAS programming. In the book's introduction, we stated that the book doesn't cover the SAS programming language, but that there are many other fine books that
...if man is still alive, will he be importing Excel spreadsheets and wondering why his leap years are off? I received this report from SAS Technical Support, on behalf of a customer who uses SAS Enterprise Guide to import spreadsheet data: The date "12/31/9999" will import as "02Jan****" when reading
Although you probably didn’t notice, I stepped away from this blog for the last two months to think about something more important: The current state of business forecasting. I’d come to realize there is a lot of animosity in the world of forecasting. We have advocates of statistics, and advocates
SAS For Dummies 2nd Edition is now available. It's not just more of the same -- it's got lots of cool new stuff in it too. It's completely updated for SAS 9.2. It's got a new chapter on data mining. And it's got a new chapter on SAS programming. I
Robert Springborn has a special relationship with his SAS software. Like many long-time SAS users, Robert’s livelihood depends upon his advanced skills with SAS technology, as well as his analytical expertise. He’s been using SAS for over 28 years, which means when it comes to writing SAS programs, he’s comfortable
Today, I had the privilege of speaking to a group of high school students at a community outreach event sponsored by the Human Resources division at SAS. Approximately 80 students from schools as far away as Charlotte came to visit SAS and hear about the impact that SAS and analytics
It's March, and in North Carolina all of the talk is about college basketball. At SAS, we like to brag about how these guys use SAS analytics to predict the NCAA "dance card" with astounding results. This year, the fun question revolves around conference bias and how it affects a
