Recently, I read Dr. AnnMaria De Mars' blog post "Translating Ruby to SAS (or vice versa)." I found that I really liked it, and not just because she mentions me (although that was pretty cool). But rather, I like the end of the post, where she identifies a key value
Contributed by Chris Hemedinger, coauthor of SAS for Dummies, Second Edition, the genius behind The SAS Dummy blog, and the moderator of the SAS Enterprise Guide discussion forum. The SAS log is your source for information if you want to know the following: What SAS did while running your program
When upgrading from an existing 4.2 client install of SAS Add-in to MS Office, you are not prompted to enable the Outlook portion of the Add-in. As SAS points out in the KB Post http://support.sas.com/kb/40/272.html, there is a 'Switcher Utility' available in the client install. When running this, I would
If you are a statistical programmer, sooner or later you have to compute a confidence interval. In the SAS/IML language, some beginning programmers struggle with forming a confidence interval. I don't mean that they struggle with the statistics (they know how to compute the relevant quantities), I mean that they
There are two very different ways to think about keywords on the Web: one is for writers and one is for researchers. Web copywriters are often advised to use keywords that customers type into search engines. Researchers, on the other hand, are told to focus on the words that customers
Modern manufacturing has come a long way in employing rigorous quality initiatives, but when a defective toy, electronic – or even a baby diaper – does slip past the quality initiatives, the current customer sentiment climate can make the situation go from bad to worse very quickly. It isn’t easy
A recurring theme of The Business Forecasting Deal (both this blog and the book) is that forecasting is a huge waste of management time. This doesn't mean that forecasting is pointless, irrelevant, or entirely useless in running our organizations. It only means that the amount of time, money, and human
The Flowing Data blog posted some data about how much TV actors get paid per episode. About a dozen folks have created various visualizations of the data (see the comments in the Flowing Data blog), several of them very glitzy and fancy. One variable in the data is a categorical
Contributed by SAS Publishing's Julie M. Platt, Mary Beth Steinbach, Shelly Goodin, and Sandy Varner Wednesday, February 16 Julie M. Platt TOC ended with a series of presentations that focused in how to get content noticed. In thinking about our authors, their content, and our users, my key takeaways today
I've known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I've observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife's grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean aluminum foil for potential reuse in the household -- because such materials were once scarce. The
I've written about this topic before, but find that more people are interested in how this works. Hoping to provide more detail below. Let me know if I missed anything! When using the 'GEO' dimension type in SAS OLAP Cubes, users will not see anything new unless the OLAP cube
I recently had the privilege to work with Charlene Li, one of our industry's thought leaders, on a Webinar that SAS sponsored and the American Marketing Association produced, titled "Drive Marketing Relevance in Today's Digital World." The SAS host and architect of the discussion's content was Jonathan Hornby, one of
Contributed by SAS Publishing's Sandy Varner, Julie M. Platt, Mary Beth Steinbach, and Shelly Goodin Tuesday, February 15 Sandy Varner Being at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference allows me to step away from the day-to-day work at SAS Publishing and take the 20,000 foot perspective of the publishing industry.
Suppose that you want to create a matrix in SAS/IML software that has a special structure, such as a tridiagonal matrix. How do you do it? Or suppose that you want to find elements of a matrix A such that A[i,j] satisfies a certain condition. How do you get the
Contributed by Mary Beth Steinbach, SAS Press Managing Editor and Shelly Goodin Yesterday four of us from SAS Publishing flew into NY for the 2011 Tools of Change Conference (TOC). For the next two days we'll blog about our experience and striking book trends. (Plus, you can watch TOC keynote
Anne Milley and I recently had the chance to catch up with Eric Siegel, Chair of Predictive Analytics World for some Q&A regarding the upcoming conference that takes place during Data Driven Busines Week March 14-15 in San Francisco. Question: What a great line-up we see shaping up for Predictive
How important is accurate telecom forecasting? Sitting through another presentation this week on the explosive growth of mobile data, and the eye-popping statistics about how many Facebook and Twitter users there are, I can’t help but be excited by the possibilities. But I also have this feeling of déjà vu
Brian Whittington mentioned last month that government is innovating, and at great speed. Based on what I’ve seen in our line of work with state and local governments around the country in the past year, I have to agree. In the face of today’s daunting fiscal challenges, state and local
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
Quiz time. Just to see if you learned anything from the last go around. The “V”, by the way, could stand for “volatile”, as in the 2008-09 global economic meltdown, or perhaps “volcano”, as in the 2010 eruptions of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Did you have a Plan V for the
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
We are getting ready to kick off this year's Applying Business Analytics Webinar Series. You can participate in the monthly live webinars and hear directly from organizations that are actively applying analytics, BI and data management to create business value. We promise it will be worth your time! The series
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
