North Carolina is a very diverse state - especially when it comes to outdoor recreation opportunities. This weekend you could go hiking or kayaking in the mountains, watch a hot air balloon festival near Raleigh, and go wind surfing or fishing at the coast. And if you've got your SCUBA
Citizens served by the government are increasingly the same digital savvy consumers that market disruptors in banking, retail and utilities are attracting with sophisticated, data-driven online experiences. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement; consumers get to buy services in ways that suit them while businesses get the efficiencies they want, wrestling
Elizabeth is courageous. Scoliosis since birth, corrective spinal surgery replaced her spine with steel, tripping on stairs permanently broke her right ankle. Then she decided to come take yoga with me. To help ease back pain & reduce hip stress, I offered options like bent legs not cross. In class
Thanks to 100 dedicated volunteers who spent their entire weekend digging into data at North Carolina’s first-ever DataDive: The Anti-Defamation League was able to cite the new approaches it was taking to analyzing hate crime data when its CEO testified before the US Senate in early May. Counter Tools, a
Among the many celebrations observed this month, May is National Bike to Work Month. If you’ve always wanted to commute by bike, this is a great time to give it a try. Depending on your specific location across the globe, the weather here in Cary, NC is typically mild in May
Around the world, animals continue to be added to the endangered species list. Thankfully, there are organizations like WildTrack, a nonprofit organization using non-invasive techniques to monitor endangered species. With the help of SAS® technology, WildTrack can use its collection of data to preserve endangered species and improve conservation efforts.
Phil Simon chimes in on the last five years of Hadoop with an eye toward the future.
As some of you might know, I have recently had a baby. This means that everything about my life has changed! Including how I go about making dinner. Currently, I have very limited time to prepare meals on most nights. For a while it was whatever I could make with
According to Hyndman and Fan ("Sample Quantiles in Statistical Packages," TAS, 1996), there are nine definitions of sample quantiles that commonly appear in statistical software packages. Hyndman and Fan identify three definitions that are based on rounding and six methods that are based on linear interpolation. This blog post shows
When presenting information in form of a graph we show the data and let the reader draw the inferences. However, often one may want to draw the attention of the reader towards some aspect of the graph or data. For one such case, a user asked how to highlight one
When I turn on my shower to heat up the water, I put a jar on the floor. Weird? Maybe. I once read a suggestion to reuse wasted water for household means. The idea stuck with me and the next time I turned on the shower I grabbed a jar. As the water
These days, more and more people move to where the work is. And for many people in Europe, that 'where' is Germany. I recently saw a map of Germany, that showed which country had the most foreigners living in each area. It was an interesting map, but I thought I might
In a recent Computerworld feature, Deanna Wise, Executive Vice President and CIO of Dignity Health, encouraged forward-thinking CIOs to develop partnerships within their organizations to drive better customer experiences that translate into revenue. Wise has a strong record of doing just that, collaborating with SAS to implement advanced analytics throughout
As part of the 2017 College Series, I have invited a few individuals to write guest blogs. Today’s blog comes from Christopher Campau, the Collegiate Recovery Program Coordinator for the state of North Carolina. If you have a student who has struggled with substance use in high school and you
In last week's article about the Flint water crisis, I computed the 90th percentile of a small data set. Although I didn't mention it, the value that I reported is different from the the 90th percentile that is reported in Significance magazine. That is not unusual. The data only had
My colleague Gerhard Svolba (Solutions Architect at SAS Austria) has authored his third book, Applying Data Science: Business Case Studies Using SAS®." While the book covers a broad range of data science topics, forecasters will be particularly interested in two lengthy case studies on "Explaining Forecast Errors and Deviations" and
In recent years, solar panels have become much more economical, and therefore more popular. But because of the curvature of the Earth, the angle at which you need to install the panels varies, depending on where you live. In this example, I demonstrate how to visualize this kind of data
Technical Support regularly receives incoming calls from customers who have encountered the following transcoding warning: WARNING: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the data set xxx.xxx. Either the data contains characters that are not representable in the new encoding or truncation occurred during transcoding People are not always
David Loshin explores considerations for organizations gradually making the transition to Hadoop.
Conversations around equity in education are at a fever pitch. Decades of research show that students of color and low-income students are disproportionately taught by less effective or more inexperienced teachers. Civil rights leaders encouraged the Obama administration to require states to develop Equity Plans to ensure that every student
Ensemble methods are commonly used to boost predictive accuracy by combining the predictions of multiple machine learning models. The traditional wisdom has been to combine so-called “weak” learners. However, a more modern approach is to create an ensemble of a well-chosen collection of strong yet diverse models. Building powerful ensemble models
Are you caught up in the machine learning forecasting frenzy? Is it reality or more hype? There's been a lot of hype about using machine learning for forecasting. And rightfully so, given the advancements in data collection, storage, and processing along with technology improvements, such as super computers and more powerful
A common barrier to quantitative research, especially in health and financial areas, is the inability to share sensitive data due to confidentiality and privacy. It can be difficult and time consuming to get permission to share the data, which means useful research is delayed or not even attempted. However, collaborators seeking
The US unemployment rate was down to 4.4% in April, which is the lowest we've seen since before the big recession (about 10 years ago). But a single number seldom tells the whole story, so let's look at unemployment data in several different ways, to get a more complete picture...
The April 2017 issue of Significance magazine features a cover story by Robert Langkjaer-Bain about the Flint (Michigan) water crisis. For those who don't know, the Flint water crisis started in 2014 when the impoverished city began using the Flint River as a source of city water. The water was
Deep learning made the headlines when the UK’s AlphaGo team beat Lee Sedol, holder of 18 international titles, in the Go board game. Go is more complex than other games, such as Chess, where machines have previously crushed famous players. The number of potential moves explodes exponentially so it wasn’t
Phil Simon looks at AWS's evolution before making some predictions about the future of Hadoop.
I am having a rough spring. My allergies are awful, really dreadful. I got sick and couldn't knock it for months. I injured my hip flexor in December and on some days in Jan, Feb, and March it hurt to even stand still much less exercise. And did I mention I am 50? I
Artificial intelligence. Big data. Cognitive computing. These buzzwords are the ABCs of today’s marketplace. In a recent interview at SAS® Global Forum, I discussed the unprecedented pace of change that we’re seeing in the market. It’s creating what I like to call an analytics economy. In this economy, analytics –
The forecast is frightening: Robots will take over all manual labor and self-generating code will automatically spin out the algorithms once developed by statisticians and programmers. Humans will become obsolete. What will mere mortals do all day long? Ride captive as our self-driving cars take us on a sentimental journey
