"What is the chance that two people in a room of 20 share initials?" This was the question posed to me by a colleague who had been taking notes at a meeting with 20 people. He recorded each person's initials next to their comments and, upon editing the notes, was
As you’re making your New Year’s Resolutions or reconsidering some that you’ve already put on the list, be sure to think about including SAS Press. Here are our Top 10 Suggestions: Check out the latest SAS Press books. In 2010, we published 20 books. In 2011, we’re on schedule to
A colleague posted some data on his internal SAS blog about key trends in the US Mobile phone industry, as reported by comScore. He graciously shared the data so that I could create a graph that visualizes the trends. The plot visualizes trends in the data: the Android phone is
New in 4.3, Web Report Studio users can directly report on data from OLAP cubes and data tables without the previously required information map. However, by default advanced users can only access OLAP cubes and information maps. Allowing direct access to data tables requires a change to user roles (defined
When your data are in rows, but you need them in columns, use the matrix transpose function or operator. The same advice applies to data in columns that you want to be in rows. For example, the vectors created by the DO function and the index creation operator are row
Interesting article in this quarters sascom magazine by Jeff Ma – the guy behind “bringing down the house” and the movie “21”. After explaining how he felt the power of analytics and statistics was not unlike believing in God, he shared 2 stories where that faith was put to the
One of the best things about writing for the sascom blog is the amazing number of people, both internally and externally, that have reached out to share their stories and perspective, and ask more questions. It’s important for us bloggers to remember that while we may not see published comments
A colleague related the following story: He was taking notes at a meeting that was attended by a fairly large group of people (about 20). As each person made a comment or presented information, he recorded the two-letter initials of the person who spoke. After the meeting was over, he
Last December I taught a SAS Programming 1: Essentials class at Statistics Canada (Statcan). My class could barely contain their mirth while I valiantly struggled to find the semicolon on the French keyboard. Far cry from my first move to Canada (which is a bilingual country) and my excitement about
Contributed by Bruce L. Stegner, Ph.D My grandmother was from Tennessee and she came fully equipped with the accent and the ability to cook. Sadly, her fried chicken undoubtedly shortened my grandfather’s lifespan. For me, her apple pie was Nirvana on earth. One day I asked her how she learned
SAS/IML software is often used for sampling and simulation studies. For simulating data from univariate distributions, the RANDSEED and RANDGEN subroutines suffice to sample from a wide range of distributions. (I use the terms "sampling from a distribution" and "simulating data from a distribution" interchangeably.) For multivariate simulations, the IMLMLIB
Dear Web Report Studio Users, Recently, the SAS Web Report Studio (WRS) design team has been re-evaluating the mapping features and functions offered to our customers in WRS. In order to ensure that we are meeting our customer’s mapping needs, we would like to invite you to participate in a
If I think back to the training, education and networking opportunities in my business intelligence and analytics career that have made the most difference, SAS user groups (SUG) stand out. As a new user to SAS many moons ago local, regional and international groups helped me develop skills that I
AUTOEXEC.SAS wasn't enough for you. Yes, it's a sure-fire way to run SAS statements (such as LIBNAME assignments or macro definitions) whenever you start your SAS session, but you found it has limitations when used in configurations with lots of users who connect with SAS Enterprise Guide. Limitations such as:
It is often useful to create a vector with elements that follow an arithmetic sequence. For example, {1, 2, 3, 4} and {10, 30, 50, 70} are vectors with evenly spaced values. This post describes several ways to create vectors such as these. The SAS/IML language has two ways to
Retail is an interesting industry. It has its own challenges and opportunities, but what happens in retail is worth watching for marketers in any industry because retailing is the essence of a market. The storefront / cash register / online shopping cart is literally the intersection of the “supply” curve
Computing probabilities can be tricky. And if you are a statistician and you get them wrong, you feel pretty foolish. That's why I like to run a quick simulation just to make sure that the numbers that I think are correct are, in fact, correct. My last post of 2010
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be presenting another SAS Talks session on January 27th, 2011 (this month!). This talk will focus on the cool stuff in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3, especially for the SAS programmer. Here's some of what you'll learn about: Syntax suggestion and autocomplete for the SAS
If I say, social media analytics, and you say, What's that? I have some good links for you. First, you'll want to read this interview with Katie Paine, where she explains, among other things, the difference between social monitoring ,social measurement and social analytics. "Social analytics is where measurement and
Happy New Year to everyone! As we gear up to start 2011, I thought I would share a holiday story about Apple’s tablet device - the iPad! When it first appeared on the market last April, critics derided the device as being an Apple gimmick – it was, after all,
The Junk Chart blog discusses problems with a chart which (poorly) presents statistics on the prevalence of shark attacks by different species. Here is the same data presented by overlaying two bar charts by using the SGPLOT procedure. I think this approach works well because the number of deaths is
If I say, social media analytics, and you say, What's that? I have some good links for you. First, you'll want to read this interview with Katie Paine, where she explains, among other things, the difference between social monitoring ,social measurement and social analytics. "Social analytics is where measurement and
Over at the SAS/IML Discussion Forum, someone posted an interesting question about how to create a special matrix that contains all combinations of zeros and ones for a given size. Specifically, the problem is as follows. Given an integer n ≥ 1, produce a matrix with 2n rows and n
Most people don’t think about government when they hear the word “innovation”, but it’s happening, and has been since long before “The Great Recession.” However, the current economic conditions have certainly moved things along. Government responds very similarly to private industry when faced with challenges. SAS manages to do relatively
I have a confession: I am not very good at math. I know that will come as a terrible surprise and disappointment to some of you. You may even be astonished that SAS would hire someone who doesn't have a PhD in statistics. But math is not the only skill
Happy New Year!! This is a good time to think about what was going on here in SAS Education one year ago, and to introduce you to a big project that I'm really excited to "take public." In January 2010 (as well as throughout 2009), we kept getting cries for
There are times when I'm looking for the right color to highlight an item or otherwise make output beautiful. As a result, I am always struggling to find good colors to use in my output. SAS Support to the rescue. They have created a program that displays the 256 colors
Hello Open Mic readers! Thank you for reading our blog where we discuss all things related to SAS authors, the publishing industry, and programs from SAS Publishing. 36 different individuals contributed their expertise and insights to Open Mic in 2010! They discussed such topics as SAS documentation, social media, textbooks,
It's a New Year and I'm ready to make some resolutions. Last year I launched this blog with my Hello, World post in which I said: In this blog I intend to discuss, describe, and disseminate ideas related to statistical programming with the SAS/IML language.... I will present tips and
In many families, siblings draw names so that each family member and spouse gives and receives exactly one present. This year there was a little bit of controversy when a family member noticed that once again she was assigned to give presents to me. This post includes my response to
