There are three kinds of programming errors: parse-time errors, run-time errors, and logical errors. It doesn't matter what language you are using (SAS/IML, MATLAB, R, C/C++, Java,....), these errors creep up everywhere. Two of these errors cause a program to report an error, whereas the third is more insidious because
Deb Orton recently had a chance to speak with Bruce Bedford, VP of Marketing Analytics and Consumer Insights at Oberweis Dairy about social media and its role in how they do business. Oberweis Dairy is based in the Midwest and reaches its customers through 48 store locations, its home-delivery business
Here is my published Google Reader bundle that contains all of the SAS- or analytics-related blogs that are maintained by customers or others in the SAS community (excepting those by SAS employees, for which I have a different bundle). Blogs by SAS Customers AFHood Analytics Group - Blogs AnnMaria's Blog
These are the blogs that I follow that happen to be written by SAS employees. I've assembled them into a Google Reader bundle, which I have shared. I have another bundle for SAS-related blogs written by others in the community. Blogs by SAS Employees A Shot in the Arm Blog-Normal
I helped to write a quiz for the Computer Science Education Week promotions that were featured on our company intranet. Do you fancy yourself as a Comp-Sci aficionado? Let's see how you do with these. 1. Which achievement is Charles Babbage most famous for? A. Establishing software retail shops in
Last week, several of the faculty members of the International Institute for Analytics (IIA) —Tom Davenport, Jeanne Harris, James Taylor, John Elder, Bill Franks, Niel Nickolaisen, Jeremy Shapiro and I—offered some predictions for analytics in the coming year. You can hear an audio recording of the discussion or read a
While insufficiently endowed to be called a "get rich quick" scheme, here is a good way to pocket an extra $5,000 for your holiday shopping budget, and contribute to the body of forecasting knowledge. For the ninth straight year, SAS announces funding of two $5,000 research grants to be awarded
Imagine you are attending the BCS National Championship game next month. You have invested top dollar in your seats and you have been anticipating the game for weeks. You settle in to your seat with your hot dog, soft pretzel, and your favorite beverage a few minutes before kick-off because
Both covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. You can easily compute covariance and correlation matrices from data by using SAS software. However, sometimes you are given a covariance matrix, but your numerical technique requires a correlation matrix. Other times you are given a correlation matrix,
If you're like most large organizations, you've got a bunch of business intelligence and analytic applications at your fingertips. In my prior organization, a large insurance company, I believe the magic number of tools that the organization had to support was north of 40. No kidding. Now, this is a
Have you found the SAS Software Product pages yet? These pages centralize several different resources for products or solutions on the SAS support site. You get to them by selecting Knowledge Base -> SAS Software -> Product A-Z Listing. These Product pages have everything—the latest product news, a product definition,
I connect to more SAS server environments than your average SAS user. In a given week, I probably run SAS Enterprise Guide connecting to at least five different Windows-based servers, a few Unix-based servers, and maybe even a z/OS machine as well. With that many SAS environments, I'm bound to
Another Guest Post from Tricia Aanderud, SAS Programmer Extraordinaire! Here's a hint from the SAS Support site that shows you how to see all the installed templates. If you don't have SAS EG, this code allows you to quickly see the different styles. Also - it can serve as a
Sample covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. This post shows how to compute these matrices in SAS and use them in a SAS/IML program. There are two ways to compute these matrices: Compute the covariance and correlation with PROC CORR and read the results into
I enjoy reading about the Le Monde puzzles (and other topics!) at Christian Robert's blog. Recently he asked how to convert a number with s digits into a numerical vector where each element of the vector contains the corresponding digit (by place value). For example, if the number is 4321,
Computer science is more than the pursuit of "let's see what we can make this computer do." If that's your only goal, then you might make a fine computer geek, but a lousy computer scientist. In her blog post for Computer Science Education Week, Caroline McCullen reminds us that computer
I’ll never forget the first time many years ago that I saw the Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams showing Dilbert getting transferred to marketing, approaching a doorway that says “Welcome to Marketing - Two Drink Minimum.” I found it so funny until I realized that my friends in IT and
A professional acquaintance and an expert in statistics once told me that if you don't understand how to perform the process of analytics through programming - the creation of the data flow, the transformation of the variables and the development of the statistical procedure - then you had no business
The buzz word in education these days is STEM, the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Across the United States, educators are stressing the importance of STEM and states are launching huge STEM initiatives. Most of these efforts emphasize science, engineering or math, but few emphasize the powerful “T,”
During your installation, you can utilize a separate location to store the installation temporary files. The -datalocation option must be defined in the command line with setup.exe. The resulting files include: as well as: Local SettingsApplication DataSASSASDeploymentWizard9.2Bootstrap.log
The SAS/IML language enables you to perform matrix-vector computations. However, it also provides a convenient "shorthand notation" that enables you to perform elementwise operation on rows or columns in a natural way. You might know that the SAS/IML language supports subscript reduction operators to compute basic rowwise or columnwise quantities.
I'm back in the office after two enjoyable days at the Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC. (I hadn't seen that many nerds since the family reunion on my dad's side.) Among the many good sessions was one about building your blog audience by making the blog more search friendly. The
My last post was a criticism of a statistical graph that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek. Criticism is easy. Analysis is harder. In this post I re-analyze the data to present two graphics that I think should have replaced the one graphic in Businessweek. You can download the SAS program that
Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that
It seems like each week brings news announcing yet another software vendor acquisition by one of the giant software conglomerates. This approach of purchasing a specific capability to fit into the ever growing portfolio of technology does not show signs of stopping in the near future. Matter of fact, several
Contributed by Bernie Brennan and Lori Schafer Can you name a retailer that opens up its offices to the public for daily tours—and makes them entertaining, energizing, and just plain fun? We can. This same retailer prides itself on its ten core values, including creating “fun and a little weirdness.”
Guest Post from Tricia Aanderud, SAS Programmer Extraordinaire (meaning she's BASE SAS Certified and an awesome programmer!) When I send ODS HTML email to Outlook 2007, it is ugly. After a lot of research, I finally found the answer on the SAS Support site. If you use ODS HTML -
Last week I was invited to join the growing list of SAS blogs in the new sas-x.com aggregator. I was happy to add my blog there -- anything that I can do to help this content get to a wider audience. If you have a SAS-related blog, I encourage you
In April, I wrote 12 ways to write a conference blog post. It's one of those posts that I continue to share and often see others reference as well. One thing that might be implied in that post but isn't overtly stated is something of a golden rule for for
This is a continuation of my last post, Lunchtime Reading—4 Steps to Getting Started with a Lead Nurturing System. SAS’ recently implemented Lead Nurturing System is a calculated means to better serve our prospects and customers, while moving us along a continuum of turning our marketing data into more of
