Today is World Statistics Day, an event set up to "highlight the role of official statistics and the many achievements of the national statistical system." I want to commemorate World Statistics Day by celebrating the role of the US government in data collection and dissemination. Data analysis begins with data.
Perhaps the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to put away a loved one because they've been possessed by the devil. Other than that, though, I've had a good week*. And my week turns even better today, as we all join hands to celebrate World Statistics Day.
Today SAS joins thousands of others across the globe to celebrate the first World Statistics Day, proclaimed by the United Nations as a way to “help strengthen the awareness and trust of the public in official statistics.” More than 85 government agencies in nearly 70 different countries around the world
When creating an OLAP Cube from a Star Schema table, the Dimensions / Hierarchies created must be free of all blanks. This is because the name is used as a table alias in the SQL Join. The obvious error in the resulting code example below: proc sql; create table geography
The IMLPlus language has been available to SAS customers since 2002, but there are still many people who have never heard of it. What is IMLPlus? The documentation SAS/IML Studio for SAS/STAT Users says this about IMLPlus: The programming language in SAS/IML Studio, which is called IMLPlus, is an enhanced
Have you ever been stuck while trying to solve a scrambled-word puzzle? You stare and stare at the letters, but no word reveals itself? You are stumped. Stymied. I hope you didn't get stumped on the word puzzle I posted as an anniversary present for my wife. She breezed through
A few people asked me to explain the significance of the cartoon in the scrambled-word puzzle that I posted as an anniversary present for my wife. The cartoon refers to a famous experiment devised by Sir Ronald A. Fisher.
Was assisting an individual with an issue on the SAS Discussion Forum and we discovered why some users would not get the prompt to save/view excel content in excel rather than in the web browser. Essentially, the file type options were different for these users. This was causing users to
In a previous post, I discussed how to generate random permutations of N elements. But what if you want to systematically iterate through a list of ALL permutations of N elements? In the SAS DATA step you can use the ALLPERM subroutine in the SAS DATA step. For example, the
It is inspiring for me to see the determination of government employees working to provide us the level of service we have all grown accustomed to even in the midst of "The Great Recession". I don’t need to tell you that the need for government services goes up dramatically during
Today's post is a puzzle. Why? Well, my wife loves solving word puzzles, and today is our wedding anniversary. Last year, I bought her a Jumble® book. This year, I've created a one-of-a-kind scrambled word puzzle just for her. (But you can play, too!) I created this puzzle by using
Sometimes it is convenient to reshape the data in a matrix. Suppose you have a 1 x 12 matrix. This same data can fit into several matrices with different dimensions: a 2 x 6 matrix, a 3 x 4 matrix, a 4 x 3 matrix, and so on. The SHAPE function enables you to specify the number of
Yesterday, I was in the #raganSAS audience as David Pogue told me What's New and What's Next in the world of technology. David is a great presenter, and he really had the audience engaged as he talked about augmented reality, his world according to Twitter, and an iPhone app that
A little off the topic, but can anyone explain the theory of password security to me? Specifically, how does requiring me to periodically change my password improve security? Like most of you, on some of my online accounts I am reminded every few months that I must change the password.
If you're an administrator of systems that run SAS, you have probably already read up on How to Maintain Happy SAS 9 Users. If not, go read that first. Now, are you looking to squeeze the best performance out of SAS on Microsoft Windows 2008 Server? Be sure to read
My previous post on creating a random permutation started me thinking about word games. My wife loves to solve the daily Jumble® puzzle that runs in our local paper. The puzzle displays a string of letters like MLYBOS, and you attempt to unscramble the letters to make an ordinary word.
I recently read a paper that described a SAS macro to carry out a permutation test. The permutations were generated by PROC IML. (In fact, an internet search for the terms "SAS/IML" and "permutation test" gives dozens of papers in recent years.) The PROC IML code was not as efficient
A previous post described a simple algorithm for generating Fibonacci numbers. It was noted that the ratio between adjacent terms in the Fibonacci sequence approaches the "Golden Ratio," 1.61803399.... This post explains why. In a discussion with my fellow blogger, David Smith, I made the comment "any two numbers (at
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy SAS is big. It's not quite
Often, the first step of a SAS/IML program is to use the USE, READ, and CLOSE statements to read data from a SAS data set into a vector or matrix. There are several ways to read data: Read variables into vectors of the same name. Read one or more variables
The Fall issue of Foresight is available this month, and includes a review of The BFD (the book). Here is Editor Len Tashman's preview: Books reviewed in Foresight in the past have fallen into two categories: those that serve as textbooks, largely emphasizing forecasting methods, and general-interest books, that offer
Our last post, "Getting the most out of user group events," was a first for us here at Open Mic, as it was contributed by a SAS user, Dr. Bruce Stegner. I'm continually impressed by the passion, dedication and knowledge of our user base and would love to see more
Since its 4.2 release, SAS Enterprise Guide has been able to import Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 spreadsheet files (usually encountered as .XLSX files). But while SAS Enterprise Guide can export XLS files (which are compatible with all versions of Microsoft Excel), it does not have the ability to export
In a previous blog post about hurricanes, I created a histogram of the occurrence of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin during the years 1988–2003. That histogram shows that the peak of hurricane activity occurs in the second week of September, but also that a majority of tropical storms occur
This morning I read an interesting post about the design of the new Twitter Web page. The post included some R code to generate the ratio between adjacent terms in the Fibonacci seqence. The ratio converges to the "Golden Ratio": 1.61803399.... I'm sure that many R gurus will post simpler
I saw a suggestion arrive from a SAS customer who would like to see the IN operator extended to allow ranges of date values. For example, you can currently write a program that checks for values IN a collection or range of numbers: data check; if x in (1:10) then
The SAS/IML language is a vector language, so statements that operate on a few long vectors run much faster than equivalent statements that involve many scalar quantities. For example, in a previous post, I asserted that the LOC function is much faster than writing a loop, for finding observations that
AnnMaria wrote her latest blog post, "SAS Enterprise Guide makes you smarter", partly in response to my recent post about whether it's making you stupider. From the contents of her program example, I'm guessing that she's preparing for WUSS in November. I don't get to attend this year, but my
Contributed by Bruce Stegner, Ph.D, Executive Consultant I am new to this blog and to social networking via electrons. I have been to a fair number of SAS gatherings and have been reflecting on various aspects of them. I thought it might be a good idea to focus on people
The Junk Chart blog discusses a potential problem that can arise in grouped bar charts when the two groups have vastly different ranges. One possible solution (which is discussed at the Junk Chart sister blog, Numbers Rule Your World) is to present the data back-back in what is sometimes called
