In a previous post, I showed how to read data from a SAS data set into SAS/IML matrices or vectors. This article shows the converse: how to use the CREATE, APPEND, and CLOSE statements to create a SAS data set from data stored in a matrix or in vectors. Creating
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the budget problems running rampant across all levels of government. Federal, State and Local Governments are all facing historic budget shortfalls due to the economic crisis and decreased tax receipts. This has led to a much closer examination of services
Just to set the record straight, I’m a programmer who loves to write code. While SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) does make reporting easier, this time it’s not the displays that caught my eye. EG won this round hands down for ease of use to summarize data. This blog post will
On March 28 I had the pleasure of moving to our new office building on the scenic SAS campus in Cary, NC. This aesthetic and functional structure houses the sales, marketing, and SAS executive management offices, as well as a generously appointed Executive Briefing Center for hosting our visiting customers.
In a previous blog post, I showed how you can use simulation to construct confidence intervals for ranks. This idea (from a paper by E. Marshall and D. Spiegelhalter), enables you to display a graph that compares the performance of several institutions, where "institutions" can mean schools, companies, airlines, or
The popular SAS user networking site sasCommunity.org has announced a new contest called Points for Prizes that you don’t want to miss. Visit their Website for details on how you can earn points by contributing content or code. Three lucky winners will win SAS Press books! Contest rules can be
In today’s changing environment the hype seems to focus on new, updated, latest release, newly developed, cutting edge and so on. With so many new SAS books to choose from, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at our most popular backlist titles (books that were published
I recently returned from a five-day conference in Las Vegas. On the way there, I finally had time to read a classic statistical paper: Bayer and Diaconis (1992) describes how many shuffles are needed to randomize a deck of cards. Their famous result that it takes seven shuffles to randomize
Just flew back from Vegas, and boy, are my arms tired! (ba-dump) If you attended SAS Global Forum, you probably learned a lot of things you didn't know. But if you were a SAS employee, you also learned a lot of things you didn't know. One of the perks of
This morning I delivered a talk to visiting high school students at the SAS campus. The topic: using SAS to analyze Twitter content. Being teenagers, high school students are well familiar with Twitter. But this batch of students was also very familiar with SAS, as they all have taken SAS
Besides experiencing a few Elvis sightings, hanging out with Venus poolside, and temporarily joining a Cirque group--I got a chance to meet some really grounded SAS superstars at SAS Global Forum 2011. And since today is my first day back in the office post-conference, I’m revealing a few marquee moments:
Linking business analytics to economic value is a hard problem. Despite all the smarts that get poured into models, it's hard to tie them to financial measures such as profitability. And, because of that, it's hard to justify investment in analytics. Need headcount? Sorry, try again. Need tools? Sorry, can't
"Convergence after 23 iterations to (1.23, 4.56)." That's the message that I want to print at the end of a program. The problem, of course, is that when I write the program, I don't know how many iterations an algorithm requires nor the value to which an algorithm converges. How
At the beginning of 2011, I heard about the Dow Piano, which was created by CNNMoney.com. The Dow Piano visualizes the performance of the Dow Jones industrial average in 2010 with a line plot, but also adds an auditory component. As Bård Edlund, Art Director at CNNMoney.com, said, The daily
In a previous blog post about computing confidence intervals for rankings, I inadvertently used the VAR function in SAS/IML 9.22, without providing equivalent functionality for those readers who are running an earlier version of SAS/IML software. (Thanks to Eric for pointing this out.) If you are using a version of
When comparing scores from different subjects, it is often useful to rank the subjects. A rank is the order of a subject when the associated score is listed in ascending order. I've written a few articles about the importance of including confidence intervals when you display rankings, but I haven't
The federal government is more aggressively pursuing health care fraud, and helping the states do the same, by proposing funding changes and investing in new technologies. A newly proposed rule would allow 90% Federal Financial Participation (FFP) for data mining initiatives in state Medicaid Fraud Control Units (MFCU’s). Another proposed
Suppose that friendship is a 2-way relationship: Either two people are friends with each other, or they are not. (By this definition, X cannot be a friend of Y if Y is not a friend of X. Also, you cannot be a friend of yourself -- no matter how attractive
Yesterday I was in the Big Room for the rehearsal of the Technology Connection, the part of SAS Global Forum where SAS shows off its wares: what's been released recently and what's coming. I believe that customers are going to love what they see. And just about every product that
…will come home with you. This week, as many of you know, SAS Global Forum is taking place in Las Vegas. Many of our SAS Training Instructors are there teaching classes, presenting papers, hosting workshops and answering your questions in the Demo Hall. We hope the knowledge you learn at
In my article on computing confidence intervals for rankings, I had to generate p random vectors that each contained N random numbers. Each vector was generated from normal distribution with different parameters. This post compares two different ways to generate p vectors that are sampled from independent normal distributions. Sampling
While talking to fellow SAS users at SAS Global Forum 2011 this week, I'll be discussing how SAS programmers can "play" with social media data that they can access on Facebook and Twitter. I always refer people to my blog for more information, and so I've prepared this blog post
The Director of SAS Publishing, Sean Gargan, will celebrate his 25th year at SAS on April 7th, 2011. Most of you have heard the accolades given to SAS for being the best place to work. Dr. Goodnight always says it’s the people at SAS that make it so great (he’s
This morning Rick Wicklin announced his (hostile?, nah...) takeover of the technical blog space at SAS. I'll admit that it took me by surprise when I awoke in Siberia this morning. It's so cold here; I can't feel my fingers as I type. This is probably a punishment for the
Editor's Note: This article was an April Fool's prank from 2011. The entire article is fake. Today, SAS, the leader in business analytics announces significant changes to two popular SAS blogs, The DO Loop (written by Rick Wicklin) and The SAS Dummy (previously written by Chris Hemedinger). The two blogs
"Twitter, thou art nought but data." So sayeth the SAS programmer. Many data analysts now recognize Twitter for what it is: a tremendous source of data covering almost any topic, from Justin Bieber's hair to political uprisings to technical conferences to company brands. SAS offers sophisticated solutions to harness this
In SAS 9.2, internal accounts can be created and utilized within the metadata and then do not require host (or domain) accounts defined elsewhere. By default, the sasadm@saspw is one such internal account. Unless you specifically declare an exception, the server-level policies for routine password resetting and locking (such as
I’m happy to announce that Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition by seasoned SAS Press author Frederick Pratter will be available in June! Frederick has worked tirelessly to update the book, which has substantial changes from the second edition. In Frederick’s words, “practically everything has changed since the
This week, I posted the 100th article to The DO Loop. To celebrate, I'm going to analyze the content of my first 100 articles. In December 2010, I compiled a list of The DO Loop's most-read posts, so I won't repeat that exercise. Instead, I thought it would be interesting
Tomorrow, we welcome the newest member of the SAS Press Team, Aimee Rodriguez. Aimee is joining our team to provide one-on-one marketing support for our authors and books. Aimee has over 10 years of experience in publishing and marketing, including marketing and promotions at Algonquin Books, event planning and promotions,
