Before we begin, I want to thank all of you readers who supported my righteous appeal for “THE BFD” license plate from the state of North Carolina. I am sad to report, however, that our efforts were in vain and the appeal was denied by Censorship Board of the Division
In SAS Management Console, administrators have the ability to include multiple user authentication models (ie user name/pwd combinations) for a single Metadata user account in the 'Accounts' tab. Administrators would then organize these by the Authentication Domain definition in SAS Management Console. The 'DefaultAuth' is the initial account used (unless
I get this question all of the time on the discussion forum and this blog, so I feel I should help to spread the news. SAS now supports SAS 9.1.3 SP4 on Windows 2008 (32-bit edition). Here is the official statement. Update 07Oct2009: I changed this to indicate that the
At least, they will love us when they see that we've translated the SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 tutorial into Japanese and put it on the SAS support site. We've also got three flavors of Chinese (zh-TW, zh-CN, zh-HK) and Korean now available. These new editions join the Italian, German, Spanish,
Almost daily, I hear reports of scientific studies in which the researchers have used SAS for the data analysis. Typically I don't dig into the details because, frankly, the studies are usually way over my head. But this one about the effect of nut storage, nut size, and nut soaking
Thanks to the folks who support our web presence, this blog page has just received a facelift (but alas, the blogger has not). New colors, easier navigation with the breadcrumbs up top, and a new banner image that shows the SAS for Dummies cover (as if to say, "really, he's
In case you haven't heard, the state of North Carolina needs money. Roads are falling apart, parks are left unkempt, prisoners are being released, and public school cafeterias can no longer afford to put anything surprising in their Chef's Surprise. In order to help assuage the crisis, and in my
Read how Stacey and Christine are working to join the ranks of the certified (and not the certifiable, we hope). I'm sure that PROC CERTIFY (as they've dubbed it) is an example of one proc that won't end with a QUIT; but with a RUN;
Most modern programmer text editors allow you to see multiple views of the document you're working on. The SAS program editor within SAS Enterprise Guide is no exception, although we've done a pretty good job of hiding this feature. Read on and learn how to easily "divide and conquer" your
Would you buy something that doesn’t have demonstrable Return on Investment? Of course you would! Whether you realize it or not, you do this every time you buy software. There is no proven ROI. Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine. Maybe I care too much about cause
I was recently reviewing our most popular samples that we publish on support.sas.com, and I came across this one showing unusual uses for the ROUND function. As well as gathering lots of visits, this sample has also earned a very respectable rating by you, the readers. I note that we
I’m back from a week of vacation in Michigan and bursting with new topics, but will have to get to those next week (still playing catch-up in my day job). I do, however, have the pleasure to announce the publication of a new book by my friend and colleague Charlie
This is one of the coolest uses of SAS I've seen: optimizing school reassignments. I spoke with paper coauthor Rob Pratt before SAS Global Forum this year about this topic. I found the project's origin interesting: CEO Jim Goodnight was chatting with the Wake County Schools superintendant at a cocktail
Have you ever submitted a SAS program or query only to immediately regret it? It usually happens just as you finish clicking the mouse or lift your finger from the F8 key: you realize that your program has a horrible flaw that's going to make it run for hours or
The SAS internal discussion boards are always full of fascinating topics, some of which are even decipherable to a non-Ph.D. in statistics like me. A recent topic involved how to calculate the benefits of good forecasting software, and my colleague Robin Way offered an interesting perspective that he allowed me
Personally, I don’t get Twitter. I have an account (mvgilliland) for anyone interested in not hearing any tweets from me. I follow a few people and have a few followers (including some that aren't porn bots) -- but what is the point? Does anyone really care that I’m out hanging
From SAS/ACCESS (for working with databases) to SAS/ZODIAC* (for cranking out horoscopes), you'll be able to learn all you need to know about SAS products with the new product pages on support.sas.com. As of today, we're featuring just a handful of popular products within these pages. The product pages serve
In a previous posting I showed an example of how you can use the GKPI procedure in SAS 9.2 to create dashboard-quality charts. Here's a more formal sample that you can use, including a custom task that you can use in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 to point-and-click your way the
Can a crowd of thousands produce better answers than a few experts? That's the question that Sir Francis Galton asked in the 19th century and sought to statistically prove, one way or another. I recently watched an entertaining and informative segment about Galton and the so-called "wisdom of crowds" on
Geoff posted a nice article on his blog about how you can read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets programmatically from within SAS, without using DDE. I've previously written about how it's difficult to continue using DDE from SAS when you have a distributed environment (SAS on a server machine, Excel
The Summer 2009 issue of Foresight is now available, and features a section on “Rethinking the Ways We Forecast.” Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: Are traditional forecasting tools suitable for predicting complex systems like the economy and the global climate? Basically, no, argue David Orrell and Patrick McSharry: such
If you use or have used SAS Web Report Studio, the SAS usability folks want to talk to you. Here is a call for participation: Dear Web Report Studio Users, In order to make SAS Web Report Studio (WRS) a better reporting tool, WRS will be conducting a few different
I just read about how Bill Gates has too many friends to keep up with on Facebook. Social networking is tough for social butterflies like Bill and myself. If only there was some sort of tool to help me sift through my friend data and help me categorize it.
On a Monday July 20 segment of consumer advocate Clark Howard’s radio show, Clark discussed the common practice of hidden payments to influential bloggers. Apparently these high-tech shills pocket the payola, and then make favorable postings about particular products or services. According to Clark, there are new rules to prevent
Aren’t the internets wonderful? Just today I was trying to find the antonym of “naïve” and came across several terrific choices (sophisticated, worldly, well-informed, and intelligent) and one that didn’t make any sense (svelte???). However, upon further review at Merriam-Webster.com, I discovered that in addition to slender, lithe, and sleek
When you create SAS Enterprise Guide projects, what's your approach? Do you cram the process flow with thousands of nodes? Do you create different projects for each work task? Do you like one big SAS program? Or a bunch of little programs all linked together? That's the question that Michael
In April 2009, Google published a draft research paper “Predicting the Present with Google Trends,” by Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian and Decision Support Engineering Analyst Hyungyoung Choi. The paper is available for download in an April 2 posting by Varian and Choy on the Google Research Blog that has
With apologies to Johnnie Cochran and Joyce Kilmer : “If the model do fit, it don’t prove ****” This was the warning from Trick #1. As a forecaster your job is to produce forecasts – as good as they can reasonably be expected to be – not to fit models
Last year I posted a method to "mine" Twitter tweets for public sentiment after the vice-presidential debate. Patrick McLeod (University of Texas) recently posted an article showing how he adapted the method to analyze a category of tweets with the #iranelection tag. You can do fancier tricks with SAS and
The Spring 2009 Foresight feature on assessing forecastability is a must-read for anyone who gets yelled at for having lousy forecasts. (It should also be read by those who do the yelling, but you’d have to be living in Neverland to believe that will ever happen.) As I promised in
