Big news in our industry this morning: IBM plans to buy analytics software vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion. In one sense, I'm sad to see SPSS disappearing into the large IBM stack. Besides SAS, SPSS was one of the last independent analytic software companies. A colleague says, “It’s the end
Last weekend, I joined the merry band of muggles who descended on theaters across America to catch the opening weekend of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Although not strictly by the book, the movie captured the teenage angst and special brand of magic that makes this particular novel
Getting a date prompt that filters on a range of dates requires an Information Map with a date variable that exists twice on the Information Map, two different prompts, and application of both within a Web Report Studio Report. Included are steps to get this to work. Within Information Map
I’m a self-described bookworm who’s been a little slow on the upstart with cutting-edge technology and the social media that’s intertwined with much of how we go about our daily routines. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like technology, I love it and I marvel at how
On a Monday July 20 segment of consumer advocate Clark Howard’s radio show, Clark discussed the common practice of hidden payments to influential bloggers. Apparently these high-tech shills pocket the payola, and then make favorable postings about particular products or services. According to Clark, there are new rules to prevent
Publishing is a rapidly changing business. As technology continues to revolutionize the way we consume information, one thing seems to remain constant – “content is king.” SAS Publishing recognizes that our customers now carry Kindles, visit online discussion forums for solutions, edit wikis with sample code and ask programming questions
As part of my research for a sascom magazine article about how sports teams use analytics to hone performance and win games, I interviewed Jeff Ma, the former MIT student who inspired the New York Times best-seller Bringing Down the House and the movie 21. Ma now uses his analytic
Aren’t the internets wonderful? Just today I was trying to find the antonym of “naïve” and came across several terrific choices (sophisticated, worldly, well-informed, and intelligent) and one that didn’t make any sense (svelte???). However, upon further review at Merriam-Webster.com, I discovered that in addition to slender, lithe, and sleek
Almost every other article or blog or survey I read nowadays discusses virtualization and cloud computing topics. Why? Partly because IT operations and infrastructure professionals are facing difficulty monitoring and managing computing resources in a distributed environment. They have to ensure that capacity is always available to be assigned as
When you create SAS Enterprise Guide projects, what's your approach? Do you cram the process flow with thousands of nodes? Do you create different projects for each work task? Do you like one big SAS program? Or a bunch of little programs all linked together? That's the question that Michael
In April 2009, Google published a draft research paper “Predicting the Present with Google Trends,” by Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian and Decision Support Engineering Analyst Hyungyoung Choi. The paper is available for download in an April 2 posting by Varian and Choy on the Google Research Blog that has
With apologies to Johnnie Cochran and Joyce Kilmer : “If the model do fit, it don’t prove ****” This was the warning from Trick #1. As a forecaster your job is to produce forecasts – as good as they can reasonably be expected to be – not to fit models
Laurie Ruettimann of the Punk Rock HR blog is seeking your best advice for jobseekers. Despite all the articles, books and blog posts out there telling people how to land their dream job, people still miss some fundamental things. Plus, as we all know, it's a tough market. If you've
Instead of writing proc metalib statements, SAS has a custom task that you can download into Enterprise Guide. This interface provides non-SAS coders a quick mechanism to register new tables created on the server to the Metadata Library. http://support.sas.com/demosdownloads/setupcat.jsp?cat=SAS%20Enterprise%20Guide
Last year I posted a method to "mine" Twitter tweets for public sentiment after the vice-presidential debate. Patrick McLeod (University of Texas) recently posted an article showing how he adapted the method to analyze a category of tweets with the #iranelection tag. You can do fancier tricks with SAS and
The Spring 2009 Foresight feature on assessing forecastability is a must-read for anyone who gets yelled at for having lousy forecasts. (It should also be read by those who do the yelling, but you’d have to be living in Neverland to believe that will ever happen.) As I promised in
Recently I speculated about the future audience I'll be talking with in 20 years. Despite being someone who thinks on a daily basis about communicating as a brand, I think that mindset is on the way out. I don't mean we shouldn't have brand standards and think about how our
SAS programmers can often be (um...let's see...how best to put this...) set in their ways -- at least when it comes to their SAS work. This is due in part to the nature of SAS. The SAS program that you wrote 20 years ago in Version 5 probably still works
Today I welcome guest blogger Len Tashman, Editor of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. I’ve been a big fan of Foresight since its inception in 2005, and the Spring 2009 issue contains a special feature on a topic close to my heart -- assessing forecastability. Here is Len’s
Recent research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of SAS illustrates both the scope of the proposed reforms and the scale of the challenge ahead in risk management. In March 2009, the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a global survey of 334 senior financial services professionals, of whom 50
David Meerman Scott has a great post this morning called "Social Media is the new punk rock", with a link to a very clever video created by Engage | ORM. The analogy is that punk rock was a reaction to corporate control of the music industry, they used whatever tools they could
The initial installation of a SAS Metadata Server allows for all undefined (in SAS User Manager) users to have access. It is recommended (after testing the entire install & before deploying to the business) that the security defined in the ‘Users & Permissions’ tab of the Default ACT is modified
(At least about this one thing.) I wrote this post on a plane to Germany, where I was headed to present at our annual Global Web Summit, where all (or most) of the folks at SAS setting our web direction met to talk about SEO and web analytics and other
AnnMaria's blog describing her acceptance of SAS Enterprise Guide, despite the shortcomings she's found, reminded me of this Irish Spring commercial. I'd like to take the time to craft a more thoughtful response to her post, but that will have to wait for a less-hectic day. In the meantime, I
Welcome back to our green enterprise checklist for retailers. In my previous posts, I described how to create a vision for sustainability and how to evaluate your operations, merchandise, supplies, advertising and marketing. The final area on our checklist is to evaluate your people. Your People Employees must be trained
SAS-sponsored podcasts, including a few from yours truly, are available on www.sas.com. Interested in hearing from a variety of SAS authors? There are dozens of interviews available on the SAS Press site. For example, listen to the authors of the "Little SAS Book" series, Susan and Lora, as they reveal
The content for this post comes from David Henderson, lead software developer for the SAS Web Parts for Microsoft Sharepoint. David talks about these and other ideas for SAS-Sharepoint integration in his SAS Global Forum paper. We are pleased to announce the availability of SAS Web Parts 1.1 for Microsoft
Tricks aren’t just for kids (or Louisiana senators or New York governors for that matter). Tricks are the lifeblood for many a forecasting software salesperson. Why admit that forecasting is difficult, that most things can’t be forecast as accurately as we would like, or that your software has the statistical
Welcome back to our green enterprise checklist for retailers. In my previous posts, I described how to create a vision for sustainability, how to evaluate your operations, your merchandise and your supplies. The next area on our checklist is to evaluate your advertising and marketing. Your Advertising and Marketing Reduce
Geoff Livingston wrote a blog post yesterday declaring social media is dead. As you can imagine, it's generated some comment and debate. Geoff is a public relations strategist with CRT/Tanaka, CEO of Livingstone Communications and a (the?) driving force behind Blog Potomac. I saw him present at the Society for
