So much debate still rages about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what it means for the future of society and humanity. While this continues, governments around the world are actively embracing the prospect of transforming their departments into smart digital governments that are able to deliver improved services to organisations and
A pocos días de que Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) asumiera formalmente la presidencia de México, su administración envió a la Cámara de Diputados su propuesta de Egresos de la Federación para 2019, la cual asciende a $5.6 billones de pesos, 321 millones más de la correspondiente a 2018, cuando
Encouraging data sharing can sometimes feel like refereeing kids on Christmas morning. “Mom said you have to SHARE!” my sister bawled, grabbing at the Game Boy in my hand as I held the toy just out of her reach. I had just gotten it as a Christmas present and had
Certain North Carolina counties have been in the news lately, for suspected election fraud involving absentee ballots in the 2018 election. Let's analyze the voter registration and absentee ballot data, to see if we can detect anything suspicious! In order to definitively determine whether fraud & illegal activity occurred, investigators
The data revolution is causing disruption everywhere. Even governments are feeling the effects. While the public sector may be less prepared for the impending changes, government has good reasons to embrace the data revolution. First, governments have been collecting data for years. They have lots of data. This supports programs,
In my first post I looked at the role of analytics in policing and how analytics could and should be used to benefit modern policing. However, a key point that can be forgotten is analytics is only as good as the data it is based on. It’s vital to have
We got our first 'big' snow of the season here at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC ... therefore I thought this would be a great time to dig into some snow data! Follow along and pick up some tips & tricks as I plot our snow data - and
The SAS 9.4M6 software includes a new SGPIE procedure (preproduction) as introduced in the recent article - The SGPIE Procedure. In that article, I described the basic features of the two statements supported in the procedure, the PIE and the DONUT, with some examples. It is my humble opinion that
Creative government workforce approaches come in many forms. Some time ago, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offered employees an interesting choice to incentivize them to stay. Employees could either telework from home one day per week or receive $1,000. As Jon Lemon, principal industry consultant at SAS told the
The question of what happens to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as the UK leaves the European Union is one of the most taxing challenges affecting the Brexit negotiations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not something that magically produces an answer to every difficult question –
La devastación que provocó la crisis financiera de hace una década, que alcanzó a las principales economías del mundo y contagió al resto, dio origen a modificaciones y actualizaciones en las Normas Internacionales de Información Financiera (NIIF). En particular, me centraré en la NIIF 9 (o IFRS 9, International Financial
If you want to get to grips with the topic of customer intelligence, who better to ask than David Cosgrave, who leads the SAS® Customer Intelligence team in South EMEA? Over the last few years, David has written a number of articles, and contributed to several others, on the subject
A conversation with my mentor has always stuck in my mind: Teaching is not about me, directly, it’s about serving my students. Teaching is about providing each of my students what they need to learn the material and to grow academically and as an individual. Teaching is about student learning.
The opioid epidemic continues to be one of the largest challenges facing the United States. In 2016, more than 42,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses, and that number continues to climb. Recent data shows that more than 130 people die every day in the United States after overdosing on opioids,
Data management gets lost in the enthusiasm around Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Not surprising, when it's an algorithm that decides what search results to show you, guides the self-driving cars on the roads, and powers the anti-fraud bots that monitor every credit card transaction we make. Charles
Healthcare fraud is alive and well. Honesty is dead and gone. There, I’ve said it. What else are we to take from surveys that find that 27% of people would sell their work passwords...44% of them for less than $1,000?* What does it mean that 37% of survey respondents think
For this edition of the blog series about Dutch data science, I travelled to Utrecht to talk to Rik Raymaekers, coordinator of the data analytics team at the Benefits unit of the Dutch Tax Authority. Company Overview The Dutch Tax Authority is one of the largest public organisations of the
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this year's midterm election, when it comes to counting the ballots ... and I kept hearing the term provisional ballots in the news. But I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't really know much about provisional ballots. I decided to do a
The US 'midterm' elections have finally started to wind down, and we finally have some (mostly) finalized results to study. But what's the best way to visualize who won the US congressional seats in each of the 435 districts? Let's dive into this topic!... Preparation For starters, I couldn't find
In many grocery stores throughout the country, the acronym “WIC” accompanies a number of the food items on the shelves. The letters stand for the federal “Women, Infants and Children” program that provides nutritional food to pregnant women and their young children who are in need. While this is a
One would expect analytics in government to be a hot topic at a SAS government event. What the crowd didn't see coming was Margaret Weichert, Acting Director of the US Office of Personnel Management and Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget, touting her ability to
With the recent midterm elections here in the US, I frequently saw congressional district maps popping up in the news. And being a GraphGuy, I wanted to fully understand these maps, to see if I might could improve them. If you're interested in congressional district maps, follow along as I
With today being an election day here in the US, I see a lot of people wearing the 'I Voted' sticker. This got me wondering if I could create my own sticker ... using SAS software and simple graphics primitives. :-) So I started by using Proc Gslide to create
Artificial intelligence often seems misunderstood, especially in fraud. The same is true of machine learning. One of the amazing things about them is they ask the unasked questions. This occurs as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) go about their daily work. So, what is the unasked question? Too
President Donald Trump - people seem to either love him or hate him. Which makes for an interesting data-analysis topic ... tracking Trump's approval rating. Follow along as I explore some data! I'll start with what I consider the 'best' approval-rating graph I've found so far. Here's a screen-capture of
The other day I was playing around with the voter registration data for all ~8 million registered voters in North Carolina (yes - this guy knows how to have fun!), and I got to wondering what last names were the most common. I summarized the data by county, and the
I've been recovering for 15 years now, after a lengthy career caring for critically ill patients. Now, I’m part of a team at SAS that’s working to transform health care – and that's important to me because of something that happened when I was an ICU nurse. It changed my
In my previous post, I talked about why analytics was fast becoming essential for government. In particular there is rising demand for improved customer experience and increasing pressure from taxpayers to improve cost effectiveness and value for money. With increasing recognition that good customer service is not impossible, government agencies
Have you noticed a lot of graphs popping up lately, about politicians, voters, and elections? ... Well of course - it's an election year! If you follow my blog posts, then you're probably a bit "smarter than the average bear" when it comes to scrutinizing graphs. And election graphs election
According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “service performance, citizen satisfaction and public trust are closely connected. Yet how can governments overcome citizens’ declining levels of trust in the way that their data is collected and used in order to improve service accessibility and quality? It’s not difficult
