Facebook now uses technology to help detect instances of cyberbullying before it gets out of hand. I heard this report on CNN last week, and the Facebook spokesman described their detection techniques as "background technology that I can't really talk about." We don't know for certain what techniques Facebook employs
With so much focus on new media, social media, blogs and communities at Blogworld in Vegas last week, it was refreshing to hear the panelists on the “PR in a 2.0 World” panel admit that some things haven’t changed. In fact, they said a lot of the strategies that worked
In a previous post, I discussed how to use the LOC function to eliminate loops over observations. Dale McLerran chimed in to remind me that another way to improve efficiency is to use subscript reduction operators. I ended my previous post by issuing a challenge: can you write an efficient
I’m attending a Bank Administration Institute (BAI) event in Las Vegas this week. BAI is well-respected for its research, professional development and networking opportunities for banks and banking professionals. The conference, BAI Retail Delivery, is primarily attended by community banks and large regionals, but the topics are anything but colloquial.
It's like I was saying earlier: when used for good, statistics can inform your sound decisions and opinions. But stats can be used to mislead, as well. LifeHacker.com offers some basic guidance on this subject. And what if you already have the numbers you want to share, but you want
In honor of the United Nations World Statistics Day (October 20, 2010), let’s not leave finance out of the party. In fact, let’s continue with our focus from last time on the analytical and decision support payback afforded by Activity-based costing, perhaps the most underappreciated finance tool for adding value
In honor of World Statistics Day, I've been asking fans of the SAS Publishing Facebook page questions about statistics for the last two weeks. We've received lots of fun and interesting responses which I'd like to share here on Open Mic. If you're interested in celebrating with us today, join
I am not a statistician, but I love statistics. Statistics are facts, and when used for good, they are an important ingredient in sound decision making about almost any issue, whether it's about government policy or your personal behavior. The use of statistics has gone way beyond counting things, computing
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
If I say “Brazil,” what do you think of? The Girl from Ipanema? Pelé and 5 World Cup championships? Coffee? Sultry supermodels? How about statistics? Probably not, but that’s okay (I hope to change that). We Brazilians actually don’t mind being associated with fun, relaxation and other positive things. And
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
At SAS, when we talk to customers about successful business analytics implementations, we hear a lot about the importance of executive sponsorship, aligning with business goals and continuing to build on your success by tracking and celebrating the successful milestones in your analytics projects. It's no surprise, really, that social
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
Anne Milley: Congratulations on the success of the now two-year-old and growing Predictive Analytics World (PAW) conferences! What's the best way to learn about the conference? Eric Siegel: Thanks! Well, there are overviews of Predictive Analytics World DC (Oct 19-20) and Predictive Analytics World London (Nov 15-16), but in fact
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
I painstakingly created my official schedule for Blogworld Expo earlier this week and realized half-way through the exercise that almost every session I'm planning to attend is part of the Social Media Business Summit, which, as far as I can tell, is like a conference within a conference. I probably
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
This past spring I attended a Social Media Masterclass at the Event Marketing Summit, delivered by Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics. Erik is also the creator of this video called Social Media Revolution that you’ve probably seen on YouTube (it has also been featured on this blog). Here’s what
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
This is a fun and informative video from one of our partners, Sword Ciboodle. You can visit the Sword Ciboodle site to learn more about the partnership and how it can help you turn your customers into advocates.
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
~ Contributed by Courtney Peters ~ Next week I’ll be attending DMA10 in San Francisco, and I hope to accomplish a couple things while I am there. As a marketing professional, I’m eager to network with others in my field from all types of industries and market segments. I also
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
