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
It never ceases to amaze me how and where Business Analytics can add value. While researching for this week’s post, I came across a story that used the title of this post as a sub heading (OMG, I LUV SCHL!). According to Timothy Darley, Superintendent Granville Country Schools “Our graduation
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
SAS’ Contact Center has been an integral part of our company for over ten years. Composed of fifteen employees, our team services both internal and external customers. Internally we work with our marketing department to provide outbound call support for campaigns and with our sales organization to qualify and route
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
Anyone who knows me well, knows I believe in the power of three. I know I am not the first to realize the near mystical properties of this tool, and as a marketer and leader, I do my best to take advantage of it. Lions, and Tigers and Bears; the
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)
A lot has been said about how SAS is a great place to work from both the media and from long-time employees. But what is it like from the outside perspective of someone just joining SAS? Well, I joined SAS less than 90 days ago after working for two of
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
Okay…I don’t usually do the rah-rah SAS stuff, but it was a really great week here and I wanted to share. The Analytic Cheerleader is getting out her pom-poms and cheering for SAS! Since I’ve been a SAS employee for exactly 3 months, I thought it was a good time
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
There is nothing quite like third-party validation to complete the picture when telling a story. A quick peek at our Customer Success Stories page and any number of Analyst Reports tell versions of the SAS story as a great source of business solutions in ways that we could never do
Seems I rarely write blog posts unless I'm waiting around for numbers to put in our annual financial-results announcement. Why is that? In the calm before the rush to report revenue, before the new year gets under way, I have time to think. And I start thinking about how great
I'm not even at work yet, but I've already learned that SAS has been ranked as the #1 workplace on the Fortune 100 list for 2011. SAS was also number 1 last year in 2010, and has been high on the list since its inception. I'm sure there will be
Tomorrow I'll be taking a few hours away from work to build something important: the self-esteems of a handful of middle-school-aged children. I'm volunteering as a judge in a middle-school science fair. And even though I'm not a scientist ("computer science" isn't a category), I understand enough about physical science
In the latest news from the frontier of Internet technology, the NY Times presented an interesting article about the work that high tech providers are doing to ensure maximum system availability. Companies strive for the "5 nines," or 99.999% availability, although a more realistic number is a "4 nine," or
