If you tell my wife that she's married to a statistical geek, she'll nod knowingly. She is used to hearing sweet words of affection such as You are more beautiful than Euler's identity. or My love for you is like the exponential function: increasing, unbounded, and transcendental. But those are
It’s no surprise that the coauthors of the latest Wiley and SAS Business Series book The Executive's Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy are extremely socially savvy. David B. Thomas and Mike Barlow really know their stuff. It may surprise you, however, that author Thomas has unveiled an enticing new
The Winter 2011 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman's preview: This issue of Foresight—our 20th since the journal’s genesis in 2005—begins with a new feature, Joe and Simon Sez. Joe is Joe Smith of Dean Foods and author of three valuable Foresight articles on forecast
In a previous blog post, I described the rules for a tic-tac-toe scratch-off lottery game and showed that it is a bad idea to generate the game tickets by using a scheme that uses equal probabilities. Instead, cells that yield large cash awards must be assigned a small probability of
Because of this week's story about a geostatistician, Mohan Srivastava, who figured out how predict winning tickets in a scratch-off lottery, I've been thinking about scratch-off games. He discovered how to predict winners when he began to "wonder how they make these [games]." Each ticket has a set of "lucky
I enjoyed the Dataists' data-driven blog on the best numbers to choose in a Super Bowl betting pool. It reminded me of my recent investigation of which initials are most common. Because the Dataists' blog featured an R function that converts Arabic numerals into Roman numerals, the blog post also
The other day, someone asked me how to compute a matrix of pairwise differences for a vector of values. The person asking the question was using SQL to do the computation for 2,000 data points, and it was taking many hours to compute the pairwise differences. He asked if SAS/IML
I'm not supposed to be working on this blog post right now. I've stayed late at the office under the pretense of working on "the book." It's the book about creating custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide, and I've been working on it for quite a while. I enjoy writing
Contributed by Sean Gargan, Director of SAS Publishing Julie Platt, Editor-in-Chief of SAS Press Peggy Haas, Manager of Publishing Production and Pre-Media Services Upon returning from the exhilarating Digital Book World 2011 conference—and from being stranded in a New York snowstorm—SAS Publishing’s Sean Gargan, Julie Platt, and Peggy Haas thawed
On Friday, I posted an article about using spatial statistics to detect whether a pattern of points is truly random. That day, one of my colleagues asked me whether there are any practical applications of detecting spatial randomness or non-randomness. "Oh, sure," I replied, and rattled off a list of
When you pass a matrix as an parameter (argument) to a SAS/IML module, the SAS/IML language does not create a copy of the matrix. That approach, known as "calling by value," is inefficient. It is well-known that languages that implement call-by-value semantics suffer performance penalties. In the SAS/IML language, matrices
As the new editor of SAS Publishing’s blog, I’m a bit nervous about this first post. Besides following in the footsteps of former blog editor and new SAS Social Media Manager Kirsten Hamstra, I’m attending the Blogging Success Summit 2011 presented by some of the best bloggers in the business.
Millions of Americans will be gathering around the television this Sunday to watch Super Bowl XLV. They'll gather in bars and private homes, prepare billions of calories worth of snacks, and root for their favorite teams. But if you're looking for an alternate form of entertainment, why not watch "New
Last week I generated two kinds of random point patterns: one from the uniform distribution on a two-dimensional rectangle, the other by jittering a regular grid by a small amount. My show choir director liked the second method (jittering) better because of the way it looks on stage: there are
We live in a world of digital communications, where social media provides the global population with the opportunity to come together like never before. This has brought a whole new dimension to consumer interaction. It provides instant channels for information exchange, experience and opinion sharing. Social media and multichannel digital
One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn a new area of statistics. I'm off to a good start, because I recently investigated an issue which started me thinking about spatial statistics—a branch of statistics that I have never formally studied. During the investigation, I asked myself: Given an
Last week I presented a SAS Talks session for SAS programmers using SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. It was well attended, which pleased me. You never know how it's going to go with a webinar. People register and sign in, but they are at their desks in their offices/cubicles/homes where distractions
In SAS 9.2, OLAP Member Level Security became that much easier to implement. From SAS Management Console, an administrator can navigate directly into the OLAP Cube Dimension, add a user, grant explicit 'Read' access and click a button to get a snazzy interface to add read or deny security. The
Editor's Note: The following question was recently asked of our statistical training instructors. Terry Woodfield, along with Bob Lucas took the time to write this eloquent and easily digestible answer. Question: I'm trying to get a general – very general – understanding what the Bayes theorem is, and is used
As Cat Truxillo points out in her recent blog post, some SAS procedures require data to be in a "long" (as opposed to "wide") format. Cat uses a DATA step to convert the data from wide to long format. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach, I prefer to
I sing in the SAS-sponsored VocalMotion show choir. It's like an adult version of Glee, except we have more pregnancies and fewer slushie attacks. For many musical numbers, the choreographer arranges the 20 performers on stage in an orderly manner, such as four rows of five singers. But every once
I have to confess that I hate writing. Well, maybe I don’t hate writing per se, but rather my grammar usage is less than up to par. I tend to misspell words so often that it’s a wonder I haven’t broken a few spell checkers by now. Why have I
I have recently had the great opportunity to be a part of a very special project called the North Carolina Bio-Preparedness Collaborative (NCB-Prepared) It is a public-private partnership that includes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), North Carolina State University, and SAS, with support from the US
Last week I talked about how I volunteered to serve as a judge for a middle-school science fair. As I expected, I enjoyed the experience quite a bit, and I hope the students got something positive from me as well. I evaluated several really impressive projects at the 7th grade
A histogram displays the number of points that fall into a specified set of bins. This blog post shows how to efficiently compute a SAS/IML vector that contains those counts. I stress the word "efficiently" because, as is often the case, a SAS/IML programmer has a variety of ways to
Have you ever wanted to compute the exact value of a really big number such as 200! = 200*199*...*2*1? You can do it—if you're willing to put forth some programming effort. This blog post shows you how. Jiangtang Hu's recent blog discusses his quest to compute large factorials in many programming languages.
Who doesn’t like bargains? I’m sure you will all agree that good quality at a next-to-nothing cost is irresistible. My recent Dollarama run had me ecstatic about the gloves that come in all colours, styles and sizes for just over a dollar. (Fact: big retail stores charge over 10 times
The other day I needed to check that a sequence of numerical values was in strictly increasing order. My first thought was to sort the values and compare the sorted and original values, but I quickly discarded that approach because it does not detect duplicate values in a montonic (nondecreasing)
It has become routine. For the 14th straight time – which is every year since its first publication in 1998 – SAS has made the Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. This includes eight appearances in the top ten, and in 2011, for the second year in a
In a previous post, I described ways to create SAS/IML vectors that contain uniformly spaced values. The methods did not involve writing any loops. This post describes how to perform a similar operation: creating evenly spaced values on a two-dimensional grid. The DATA step solution is simple, but an efficient
