This week we celebrate the 35th anniversary of SAS user group meetings with SGF 2010 (formerly known as SUGI). SAS has exhibited extraordinary growth and success since that first meeting of five users in 1975. Over this time span, we have also seen major advancements in the field of modern
On a recent vacation cruise, while snorkeling with my wife in Cozumel, the diamond in her wedding band unfortunately was dislodged and became one with the ocean floor. After futile efforts to find the lost diamond, it was evident to me that I needed to get her a replacement ring
A colleague recently sent me a link to a Stubborn Mule blog post titled “Pyramid Perversion – More Junk Charts.” The author refers to a graphic (shown below) that came from the Consumerist. The Stubborn Mule author had a number of problems with it. I have even more. The graphic
While I was reading the news the other day, the BBC used a tree map to illustrate Internet traffic in January 2010 for the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia (from Nielsen). The tree map was a pleasant surprise and a great way to communicate how
Until last week, it had been a while since I've been to a trade show. My colleague and favorite chemist, Lou Valente, asked me to join him in the JMP booth at Pittcon, the Pittsburgh Conference. The Pittsburgh Conference is a huge event with 20,000+ chemists and other laboratory scientists
After my previous exploration of colors and names revealed inconsistencies in the Wikipedia color data, I looked around for a more authoritative source of color names. No luck finding an oracle, but I did find another interesting data set. Where the Wikipedia table provided color values for a given set
In "How many words for red?" (and part 2), blogger Sean Roberts shows some interesting visuals of named colors. He's trying to correlate the number of names of a hue with the different perceptual space of each hue from a psychology angle. I'm always interested when the raw data for
You’d have to be living in the most desolate areas of the globe not to feel the onslaught of information clamoring for our attention. In the midst of it all, there are pieces that inform and enlighten, but most information is just noise. Those of us who spend time on
JMP benefits heavily from the pictorial superiority effect. To save you a moment of searching in Wikipedia, here's what that is: "According to the picture superiority effect, concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented as pictures rather than as words." I was reminded of
The fourth Science Online conference just wrapped up, and it was as lively as ever. Unfortunately, my attendance was limited since I was coming down with a cold. I attended only a couple of sessions and tried to keep interactions to a minimum, which was hard to do at such