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
The TEXT plot was introduced with SAS 9.4M2 to facilitate placement of text strings in a graph. This replaces the MARKERCHAR feature of the SCATTER plot statement, which is still available, but it is better to use TEXT plot in most cases. The syntax is: text x=column y=column text=column </
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
Here in the US, we recently had a new Supreme Court Justice appointed. This is a very important position, and judges usually serve until they retire or die. My buddy Rick gave me a heads-up that there was a table of all the past & present justices on Wikipedia, and
An abundance of data does not equal an abundance of wisdom. At the SAS Government Leadership Forum, leaders from federal, state and local agencies will discuss how analytics can bridge the gap between data and wisdom to make meaningful changes in how government operates. Analytics, however, is not just about
El Estudio de Evasión Fiscal Global, realizado por la Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), por encargo del SAT, revela que la evasión fiscal le cuesta a México alrededor de $510,000 millones de pesos, particularmente en rubros como el impuesto sobre la renta, el impuesto al valor agregado y combustibles
At the heart of the UK’s 2017 Government Transformation Strategy lies the ambition to “put more power in the hands of citizens and being more responsive to their needs.” Digital technologies, such as AI, can rapidly accelerate this ambition – in fact, they already are in certain government circles. It’s
Once a disaster is over, and the frenzy of news stories and social media posts has subsided, it can seem like the crisis has passed. However, for those Hurricane Florence survivors left with ruined homes and businesses, damaged schools and buildings, there remains a struggle to return to normalcy. As
En un mundo que a diario se transforma con los datos y los avances tecnológicos, cada vez son más las organizaciones que están adoptando la Analítica y la Inteligencia Artificial para fortalecer sus procesos y entregar mejores resultados a sus clientes. Este escenario no es ajeno al sector gobierno, que
About two-thirds of the way through her Analytics Experience presentation, Dr. Tricia Wang showed a video from Frans de Waal, a world-renowned primatologist. The video showed two monkeys receiving rewards for giving a researcher a rock. Each time a monkey handed over a rock it received a piece of cucumber.
Here in North Carolina, a hurricane recently moved very slowly across our state, causing major flooding, and even closing miles of interstate highways for longer than a week. There is data available online for gauges along the river (or gages, as they call them), but I doubt many people know
As someone who worked in the police force for many years, I know just how important each small piece of evidence can be in securing a conviction. So in times of tightening budgets, imagine how useful it could be to have technology that helps predict when or where crimes will
"We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain, and big ol' fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." Was that a quote from the Forrest Gump movie, or something said regarding Hurricane Florence? Could be either one! Hurricane Florence recently came through
Nothing says you are wasting your time and energy more than referring to a process as plowing a field with a fork. I liked to use this phrase as a manager and auditor, especially in government. Good data analytics makes a big difference in problem solving. Does anyone think a
The data I was analyzing was about “trust.” Maybe that’s what got me thinking about Stephen Sondheim, the Broadway composer and lyricist of musicals like Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods and the lyricist for West Side Story. Trust is a heavy emotional topic. Developmental psychologists
Many of the most beautiful areas in the US are owned by the government, to preserve them and allow access for everyone to enjoy them. And most US schools are traditionally closed during the summer, which provides families a great opportunity to go visit state and federal lands (parks, forests,
El Gobierno colombiano está alineado con los avances en el sector de tecnología y telecomunicaciones y ha sido enfático en ello, tanto así que en el encuentro más importante del sector en Colombia, Andicom, celebrado hace unas semanas, el nuevo gobierno señaló que era imperativo contar con políticas y acciones
