My previous post on creating a random permutation started me thinking about word games. My wife loves to solve the daily Jumble® puzzle that runs in our local paper. The puzzle displays a string of letters like MLYBOS, and you attempt to unscramble the letters to make an ordinary word.
I recently had the pleasure to sit in on one of our customer presentations at the CRM Evolution Conference in New York. Sean Lowe, the Managing Director of Endless Vacation Rentals and Revenue Management for Wyndham Exchange & Rentals, gave a presentation about how his company manages the demand forecasting
"Conversations pertaining to the oil and gas industry right now are toxic, to say the least," says Blake Jackson, Social Media Coordinator for Chesapeake Energy. Blake spoke today at a Ragan communications conference hosted at SAS headquarters in Cary, NC. In an environment where conversations about the energy industry tend
I recently read a paper that described a SAS macro to carry out a permutation test. The permutations were generated by PROC IML. (In fact, an internet search for the terms "SAS/IML" and "permutation test" gives dozens of papers in recent years.) The PROC IML code was not as efficient
The issues marketers face are daunting. Let’s talk about three. Email. Response and opt out rates are awful. So we struggle to push thru the noise and stand out. We work to develop a strong list, message, and call-to-action. But we can’t know for certain if our offer will resonate
A previous post described a simple algorithm for generating Fibonacci numbers. It was noted that the ratio between adjacent terms in the Fibonacci sequence approaches the "Golden Ratio," 1.61803399.... This post explains why. In a discussion with my fellow blogger, David Smith, I made the comment "any two numbers (at
Momentum for SAS Customer Intelligence is at an all-time high, and we’re responding in kind by taking it to the streets with a blockbuster line-up for October this year in a city near you. These opportunities have been designed to enable you to interact with both SAS and non-SAS experts
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy SAS is big. It's not quite
Often, the first step of a SAS/IML program is to use the USE, READ, and CLOSE statements to read data from a SAS data set into a vector or matrix. There are several ways to read data: Read variables into vectors of the same name. Read one or more variables
The Fall issue of Foresight is available this month, and includes a review of The BFD (the book). Here is Editor Len Tashman's preview: Books reviewed in Foresight in the past have fallen into two categories: those that serve as textbooks, largely emphasizing forecasting methods, and general-interest books, that offer
Attending DMA 2010? We’d love to have you as our guest at one or more of our three presentations, or at our book signing and networking event with Chris Brogan. Here are the details. Explore better ways to connect with customers in these presentations: First, we will present Enhance Consumer
Our last post, "Getting the most out of user group events," was a first for us here at Open Mic, as it was contributed by a SAS user, Dr. Bruce Stegner. I'm continually impressed by the passion, dedication and knowledge of our user base and would love to see more
Since its 4.2 release, SAS Enterprise Guide has been able to import Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 spreadsheet files (usually encountered as .XLSX files). But while SAS Enterprise Guide can export XLS files (which are compatible with all versions of Microsoft Excel), it does not have the ability to export
In a previous blog post about hurricanes, I created a histogram of the occurrence of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin during the years 1988–2003. That histogram shows that the peak of hurricane activity occurs in the second week of September, but also that a majority of tropical storms occur
In this segment of “The Nuts & Bolts of Social Media,” Kirsten Hamstra outlines the details of how SAS Publishing planned and executed its social media strategy. SAS Publishing was the first SAS division out on Social Media and they achieved good early success through planning, and are able to
This morning I read an interesting post about the design of the new Twitter Web page. The post included some R code to generate the ratio between adjacent terms in the Fibonacci seqence. The ratio converges to the "Golden Ratio": 1.61803399.... I'm sure that many R gurus will post simpler
I saw a suggestion arrive from a SAS customer who would like to see the IN operator extended to allow ranges of date values. For example, you can currently write a program that checks for values IN a collection or range of numbers: data check; if x in (1:10) then
Next week, I'll be part of a blogging panel at the Ragan conference, "The Role of Communications in Creating Best Places to Work." I'm on the panel with colleagues David Biesack, Chris Hemedinger and Becky Graebe, and we'll primarily be talking about our internal blog program on the SAS intranet,
The SAS/IML language is a vector language, so statements that operate on a few long vectors run much faster than equivalent statements that involve many scalar quantities. For example, in a previous post, I asserted that the LOC function is much faster than writing a loop, for finding observations that
AnnMaria wrote her latest blog post, "SAS Enterprise Guide makes you smarter", partly in response to my recent post about whether it's making you stupider. From the contents of her program example, I'm guessing that she's preparing for WUSS in November. I don't get to attend this year, but my
Contributed by Bruce Stegner, Ph.D, Executive Consultant I am new to this blog and to social networking via electrons. I have been to a fair number of SAS gatherings and have been reflecting on various aspects of them. I thought it might be a good idea to focus on people
The Junk Chart blog discusses a potential problem that can arise in grouped bar charts when the two groups have vastly different ranges. One possible solution (which is discussed at the Junk Chart sister blog, Numbers Rule Your World) is to present the data back-back in what is sometimes called
Today, financial services organizations are swamped in data because of regulatory requirements, years of rapid growth, mergers and acquisitions, and Internet-accessible data. This flood has many firms struggling with disparate sources and varying degrees of data quality. There are several reasons your organization might choose to integrate its data, including,
We have all heard the old axiom that all politics are local. Recently, I have been in discussions about international responses to major disasters, Specifically, the floods in Pakistan, Haitian earthquake and Indonesia tsunami of 2004. In each of those cases, there were massive international responses to the crisis. Numerous
Contributed by Christine Kjellberg, Marketing Specialist and Joel Wilson, Systems Administrator As Stacey and I have mentioned in previous posts, we have expanded our study group to include another co-worker, Joel Wilson. The three of us meet weekly to review and discuss all things certification-related. Today’s installment of Open Mic
For the first time this year, our M2010 Data Mining Conference marketing team decided to give Facebook advertising a try. I ran a split test, to test the criteria used to identify the reach (keywords versus SAS connections). At the end of the week, my ads had received 517 clicks
The SAS/IML run-time library contains hundreds of functions and subroutines that you can call to perform statistical analysis. There are also many functions in Base SAS software that you can call from SAS/IML programs. However, one day you might need to compute some quantity for which there is no prewritten
As a kid growing up on the farm, I knew the difference between good quality tools and cheap imitations. Farm equipment was very unforgiving to tools, so the cheap imitations wouldn’t last long. Fast-forward to being an adult living in a suburb of Minneapolis, and I quickly became a fan
Visualizing the distribution of data is a primary task of data analysis. With all the hurricane activity in the Atlantic this year, I’ve been thinking about ways to visualize the historical distribution of hurricane activity. USA Today on Friday, August 13, 2010, announced that "the heart of hurricane season is
Bernd Jan Sikken leads multi-stakeholder initiatives at The World Economic Forum (WEF) that aim to find solutions for fundamental issues such as demographic shifts and environmental sustainability. As an Associate Director, Sikken plays a role in the independent organization that is committed to improving the state of the world by
