These days many devices (such as smart phone apps, Fitbits, Apple watches, dog tracking collars, car gps, hiking gps, teen/car trackers, etc) can track your location, and provide you with standard/canned ways to analyze the data. This blog post shows how I created a custom SAS map of the tracking
Discovery Channel's Shark Week starts July 5, 2015 - and I've created a special SAS map & graph of shark attacks in North Carolina to get you in the mood for their week of shark education! But first, to get you in the mood for my blog, here's a picture
What cities have the most and least profitable public transportation services in the US? Perhaps you can find out in this graphical visualization of the data! The US data I'm analyzing here covers things like buses, vans, and rail ... but it might be even more interesting to analyze data from
My previous blog was about popular first names ... now for a blog about popular surnames (ie, last/family names)! But before we get started, here's a little pop-quiz - what country is my friend Mr. Foley's surname from?
A recent news report shows an unexpected spike in traffic fatalities here in the US in 2015. This got me wondering what the data shows ... for the past 100 years or so... Driving was a lot more dangerous in the early days. If you were in a wreck, you
I saw an interesting graph on dadaviz.com that claimed Italians had gone from drinking twice as much as Americans in 1970, to less than Americans in recent years. The data analyst in me just had to "independently verify" this factoid ... But before I get into the technical part of this
North Carolina is one of those lucky states that has a huge variety of scenic destinations, such as mountains, piedmont, coastal plains, beaches, and 'outer banks' islands. We have state parks in all of these areas, but can you guess which state park has been trending the most during the past
Have you ever thought about retiring in another country, where your money might go further? Well here's some quantitative data to help you make an informed decision! ... First, to get you in the mood, here's a picture of my friend Erik checking out the prices at a pedal-powered food
"Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go" ... and how much should we expect to pay for gasoline during the trip? Read this blog to find out! I recently wrote a blog post about some of the factors that impact the price of gasoline. The blog had
I recently saw an interesting infographic (see partial screen-capture below) about the top 10 most annoying airline seatmate behaviors. But the infographic was one of those *long* spread out ones, that you have to scroll forever to see the whole thing. I decided to try to create a more efficient SAS
There's recently been a "States I've Visited" application going around on Facebook, where users create a map showing all the US states they've visited, and then post it on their page for their friends to see. I wondered if SAS could do a better job?... Here's a screen-capture of one
Have you noticed lower gasoline prices lately? How low will they go, and how long will they stay down? Let's use SAS to analyze some of the data!... First, let's look at just the price of gasoline over time. Here's a plot of the US average gasoline price, each week
Is the type of car you drive more likely, or less likely, to get a speeding ticket? Let's analyze some data to find out! Do red cars attract more attention from the police, and get more tickets? How about cars with a 'racing stripe'? Or cars with a big chromed motor,
SAS is great at helping make important business decisions - how about helping decide where to take your next vacation?... Here's a picture from one of my favorite vacations with my buddy Joe. As you can see, I like "nature vacations." Can you guess where this one was? (leave a comment with
This blog post describes a neat example of some cool SAS capabilities, and also teaches you a little more about the state where SAS software is made... Here at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC, the main TV news channel is WRAL TV5. And my favorite segment during the news is Scott
I'm sure that anyone in the world would do whatever they could to help find the missing Flight 370 ... and this is my attempt to do what I can. In my previous blog post, I showed how SAS could be used to visualize the locations where planes have disappeared. This blog
With all the recent news reports about the missing Flight 370, I wondered what other airplanes have disappeared without a trace ... and I used SAS to visualize that data! There was in interesting infographic on the Bloomberg website that sort of answered my question, but their map just had
A while back, I had seen the following map on the CEOs for Cities website. It seemed like an interesting topic and an interesting map, but I just couldn't grok what their map was saying ... So I decided to download the data and create my own map with SAS. I
