"Dad? How many times do I have to roll a die until all six sides appear?" I stopped what I was doing to consider my son's question. Although I could figure out the answer mathematically, sometimes experiments are more powerful than math equations for showing how probability works. "Why don't
Anyone that keeps up with this blog knows that I'm quite fond of my SAS books. So the thought of having an electronic copy of a book seemed a bit daunting at first. But, while at PHARMSUG this past May, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Kindle from
Yesterday, Jiangtang Hu did a frequency analysis of my blog posts and noticed that there are some holidays on which I post to my blog and others on which I do not. The explanation is simple: I post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, provided that SAS Institute (World Headquarters) is
Dates and times. As Wayne Finley states in his SUGI25 paper on SAS date and time handling, "The SAS system provides a plethora of methods to handle date and time values." Along with the plethora of methods is a plethora of papers on the topic. If you want to trick
I feel privileged to have been invited back to meet with SAS customers throughout New Zealand and Australia. I also feel lucky to escape the North Carolina summer (with temperatures trending in the 90s Fahrenheit) in exchange for the "winter" weather Down Under. For a good chunk of August, I'll
Tuesday's release of SAS 9.3 included the new SAS Forecast Server 4.1, which has several valuable enhancements: Combination (Ensemble) Models: A combination of forecasts using different forecasting techniques can outperform forecasts produced by using any single technique. Users can combine forecasts produced by many different models using several different combination
A couple of weeks ago, SAS Press acquisitions editor Shelley Sessoms gamely agreed to participate in SAS Publishing's first ever "live" Facebook discussion. Shelley is an all-star author recruiter with an average RBI (real book interest) of acquiring 40 book proposals a year. Many SAS and JMP users, as well
When looking to add the Stored Process Alert Process (useful to see whether processes run in the BACKGROUND were completed successfully) the specific portlet type is not on the list. No worries, it's actually a personal portlet that is defined to present only YOUR stored process execution results. Therefore to locate
Welcome, SAS 9.3! I've already blogged about some interface and graphical changes that everyone should know about. Now I'll put on my statistical hat and mention a few 9.3 features that excite me, personally, as a data analyst and a statistical programmer: As a statistician, I am keen to try
contributed by SAS Publishing's Shelly Goodin This week's featured SAS Author's Tip is a no-brainer. With the summer heat wave in North Carolina reaching an almost unbearable level, it's cool to have Robert A. Rutledge's book Just Enough SAS on hand. This accessible guide quickly brings new SAS users up
Rick Wicklin created his own list of Five Interface and Graphics Features that Everyone Can Use. It's a very good summary of what you'll immediately notice when you use analytics procedures in SAS display manager: cool graphs turned on by default. For SAS Enterprise Guide users, you won't see such
Most of us grew up playing some type of sport and dreaming of becoming a collegiate or professional athlete. For me, it was a focus on dance and striving to be a professional ballerina. At some point we realized that in order to make this dream a reality, we’d have
In order to make the OLAP drill through data available as data tables in the Enterprise Guide, all you need to do is change the option to automatically insert the results as a data set in the project. This is extremely useful if part of your workflow includes navigating through
Here are a few new interface and graphics changes that every SAS programmer should know about SAS 9.3: HTML is now the default output destination when you run the SAS windowing environment. This means that tables and graphs appear in an HTML document instead of the classic LISTING destination. Of
Using Server-Side filters requires defined prompts with default values in Information Map Studio. But it is extremely important to note that changes to the default values (or adding a default value) to the map while the related dashboard is in use can cause some issues. The documentation has this noted
As I was reviewing notes for my course "Data Simulation for Evaluating Statistical Methods in SAS," I realized that I haven't blogged about simulating categorical data in SAS. This article corrects that oversight. An Easy Way and a Harder Way SAS software makes it easy to sample from discrete "named"
Alison posted the Top 10 Reasons you should care about SAS 9.3. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it reflects just a sample of the thousands of features and tweaks that you'll see in this new release. Even with SAS 9.2, I was nowhere near exhausting my backlog of blog topics...but
No, I’m not talking about a professional basketball game, though that would be fun to watch. I’m talking about the Joint Statistical Meetings in Miami Beach later this month. Julie Platt, Sharon Brandon and myself will be attending JSM July 31-August 4. A conference in August. In Miami. Um, can
It seems like such a simple problem: how can you reliably compute the age of someone or something? Susan lamented the subtle issues using the YRDIF function exactly 1.0356164384 years ago. Sure, you could write your own function for calculating such things, as I suggested 0.1753424658 years ago. Or you
Arnold Loewy, professor of criminal law at Texas Tech University, wrote an editorial about the Casey Anthony case that has statistical undertones. Prof. Loewy discusses the fact that there are two kinds of errors that can occur in a court trial: an innocent person can be sent to jail or
SAS Enterprise Guide sets values for several useful SAS macro variables when it connects to a SAS session, including one macro variable, &_CLIENTPROJECTPATH, that contains the name and path of the current SAS Enterprise Guide project file. (To learn about this and other macro variables that SAS Enterprise Guide assigns,
"Always clean up after yourself." My mother taught me this, and I apply it to SAS programming as regularly as I apply it at home. For SAS programming, I reinterpret Mom's saying as the following rule: Always delete temporary files and data sets when you are finished using them. How
Besides publishing stellar books on making the most of SAS software, SAS Press also provides several excellent books on using JMP. One such book is Analyzing and Interpreting Continuous Data Using JMP: A Step-by-Step Guide by Jose Ramirez and Brenda Ramirez. Reviews for the book have been strong and you
Last night I had a phone conversation with a car rental customer service rep (CSR) which went somewhat like this: Me - Hi, I’d like to rent a compact car for this Saturday in Toronto. CSR- Your name? Me- Do you have a car available? CSR-I need your name first.
As I write this, SAS 9.3 has not yet been "shipped", but its release is imminent. I've already heard many questions about how SAS Enterprise Guide works with the new version, so I decided to write this "Frequently-soon-to-be-asked questions" document to help sort it out. What version of SAS Enterprise
Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have a problem getting PDF, HTML, and RTF output from the Output Delivery System (ODS). It asks me to connect to a remote browser. When I try that, I have a connection failure. I am using Base SAS 9.2 software. What am I doing wrong?
One of the joys of statistics is that you can often use different methods to estimate the same quantity. Last week I described how to compute a parametric density estimate for univariate data, and use the parameters estimates to compute the area under the probability density function (PDF). This article
The recent issue of InformationWeek features a Q&A session with Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the Unix operating system. (He collaborated with Dennis Ritchie, of C language fame. Since much of SAS is written in C, I daresay there are a few copies of K&R around here.) One
I just celebrated my 5th anniversary of starting to run. I would have said that I just celebrated my 5th anniversary of being a runner, but I’m not sure I qualify as a “runner,” yet. I do run and I participate in a few races here and there, mostly for
If you create a scatter plot of highly correlated data, you will see little more than a thin cloud of points. Small-scale relationships in the data might be masked by the correlation. For example, Luke Miller recently posted a scatter plot that compares the body temperature of snails when they
