Do you know what the #1 fear in North America is? Most people say fear of public speaking or fear of death, but you may just want to consider this new fear upping the charts - the fear of writing a SAS Certification exam! The real test begins before even
@philsimon provides more thoughts about the opportunity that GDPR provides marketing departments.
It seems like almost everyone is sporting a gadget these days to record their every move, as fitness trackers have become increasingly popular over the last several years. While some devices have the ability to recognize mileage, steps, and even sleep patterns, perhaps the most important feedback when it comes
This article shows how to construct a "stacked band plot" in SAS, as shown to the right. (Click to enlarge.) You are probably familiar with a stacked bar chart in which the cumulative amount of some quantity is displayed by stacking the contributions of several groups. A canonical example is
Can you use a data visualization tool to display building maps, floor designs and other Esri data? With the recent addition of custom polygon support in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2, customers wondered if this feature can be utilized to render different types of regional overlays. A common request is to
The flu seems to be especially potent this year. "How potent is it," you might ask? ... Well, let's plot some data on a map to help find out! Here in the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compiles data about diseases, and provides reports and graphs
Sometimes we social worker types in Work/Life forget that other people don't use phrases like "love languages" with the same ease that the typical SAS employee might talk about "data-driven customer experience." In Work/Life we are kicking off a February series on relationships, so I wanted to take a moment to tell
Have you, or someone you know, gotten the flu this year? Word on the street is that this year's flu might be particularly bad, and the data seem to be corroborating that so far. You don't want to take my word for it? -- well then, let's have a look
I ran across an interesting conundrum the other day. The intent was to compare the value of X to a list of desired values, and if X matched one of the values in the list, set Flag to 1, otherwise set Flag to 0. I wrote and executed this test program,
Enochlophobia. It means “fear of crowds,” and I have it. I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near Times Square on New Years’ Eve, and how did I ever endure the stadium-sized rock concerts of my youth? I’m thinking all this as I navigate the sea of people at the National
What is a random number generator? What are the random-number generators in SAS, and how can you use them to generate random numbers from probability distributions? In SAS 9.4M5, you can use the STREAMINIT function to select from eight random-number generators (RNGs), including five new RNGs. After choosing an RNG,
Want instant feedback regarding your workout? It’s a numbers game! The fitness industry is making billions off data tracking wearables from Polar to Garmin and beyond. Studios are displaying heart rates on smart screens in classes, in fact, that’s one of the new gadgets we’ve added at the RFC this
Are you interested in using SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 to visualize a state by regions, but all you have is a county shapefile? As long as you can cross-walk counties to regions, this is easier to do than you might think. Here are the steps involved: Step 1 Obtain a
Let’s lay down some fundamentals. In business you want to achieve the highest revenues with the best margins and the lowest costs. More specifically, in manufacturing, you want your products to be the highest quality (relative to specification) when you make the item. And you want it shipped to the
If you have worked with the different types of score code generated by the high-performance modeling nodes in SAS® Enterprise Miner™ 14.1, you have probably come across the Analytic Store (or ASTORE) file type for scoring. The ASTOREfile type works very well for scoring complex machine learning models like random
If Necessity is the mother of Invention, then, perhaps, the father of Automation is Laziness. Automation is all about convenience, comfort, and productivity. Why do it yourself if you can devise something to do it for you! In my previous post Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux, we learned
A chatbot is a computer program that uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation and derive a response. Essentially, it’s a machine that can chat with you or respond to your chatter. Chatbots can save time and money when used to handle simple, automated tasks.
The 38th International Symposium on Forecasting will be held June 17-20 in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Registration is now open. This is the last ISF in North America until at least 2022. The ISF is the premier forecasting event for researchers, with academic attendees from all over the world. Yet it
Data doesn't always have to be 'big data' to be interesting. For example, I recently ran across a small, but very interesting, database containing all of North Korea's missile tests. The data was a bit difficult to digest in the formats provided, therefore I decided to try my hand at
Most people who work with optimization are familiar with Linear and Integer Programming, to their toolkit they could add Constraint Programming. Constraint Programming is a powerful technique that is used to solve powerful “real-world” problems in a variety of areas, such as, planning, scheduling, DNA Sequencing, computer graphics and natural
This article and accompanying technical white paper are written to help SAS 9 users process existing SAS 9 code multi-threaded in SAS Viya 3.3. Read the full paper, Getting Your SAS 9 Code to Run Multi-Threaded in SAS Viya 3.3. The Future is Multi-threaded Processing Using SAS® Viya® When I first began
David Loshin says the hardest part of compliance is knowing if a data asset contains personal data, and ensuring you can protect it.
Non-dairy milks are becoming more and more popular. Have you seen all the options at the grocery store lately? There are so many! Unfortunately, many of those options contain ingredients we may not want to have on a regular basis, like added sugar, gums, stabilizers or other fillers. Plus they
A popular way to use lists in the SAS/IML language is to pack together several related matrices into a single data structure that can be passed to a function. Imagine that you have written an algorithm that requires a dozen different parameters. Historically, you would have to pass those parameters
Using SAS with REST APIs is fun and rewarding, but it's also complicated. When you're dealing with web services, credentials, data parsing and security, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. It's useful to have a simple program that verifies that the "basic plumbing" is working before
My fear of headstand took me years to overcome. I had to learn to be safe and protect my neck. I had to learn about structurally positioning my limbs in alignment to prevent injury. I had to overcome my mental fear of being upside down which is quite different from
Are you in the early stages of your Internet of Things (IoT) strategy? According to new IoT research done by the Internet of Things Institute on behalf of SAS, you are not alone. There's been a lot of buzz in the market for several years around IoT and how it's
In the spirit of my intention this year—to be mindful vs. mind full--I was at a gathering the other day and my attention was immediately drawn to the corner of the room where a fully-blooming Amaryllis was displayed on the side table. Its beauty was shocking. Such a weirdly amazing
Is it time to add SAS to the list of "romance" languages?*. It's no secret that there are enthusiastic SAS programmers who love the SAS language. So it only makes sense that sometimes, these programmers will "nerd out" and express their adoration for fellow humans by using the code that
Amazon recently announced the 20 finalists in their search for a location to house their new 2nd headquarters (nicknamed 'hq2'). They showed a map on their web page, but I wanted to create my own map, with a few improvements ... Here's their official map. It's not terrible, but it
