Thank you SAS community for all the fun this year! We truly enjoy each moment with you as you take care of your health both here at SAS and in your adventures around the world! May you be happy, healthy, and loved now and always! While we're talking health.... Don’t
Are you a visualization & graphing expert? Can you identify which tool (R, Excel, Tableau, SPSS, Matlab, JS, Python, or SAS) was used to create each of these graphs? No cheating! I recently read Tim Matteson's blog where he presented 18 graphs, and had his readers try to guess which
I find I am so busy these days, I do all of my holiday shopping online. I set aside an hour, a glass of wine and my credit card, and I get the gifts ordered. The must-have gift for this year was a Dyson hair dryer. When the first site
As states build systems to evaluate the effectiveness of educator preparation programs, they must first know what “effectiveness” looks like. Are the characteristics of the candidates in the program, such as high school GPA, ACT or SAT score, or other admissions criteria, the most important indicators? What about the curriculum
Yesterday, I published an article on Axis values display, where I mentioned the desire expressed by many users to get x-axis tick values in Hotel text orienttion. The name comes from the way many hotel signs are displayed as shown on the right. Such arrangement of text can also be very
As I discussed in the first two blogs of this series, metadata is useful in a variety of ways. Its importance starts at the source system, and continues through the data movement and transformation processes and into operations. Operational metadata, in particular, gives us information about the execution and completion
I am writing this post with the satisfaction of having Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide, Second Edition completed and on the shelf. Once again, it was my pleasure to collaborate with Chris Holland, and I am glad that we had a chance to update the book with current
The title of this post borrows from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 comedy “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It stars the great Peter Sellers as the titular character as well as George C. Scott and Slim Pickens. The black and white film is strange
Data governance seems to be the hottest topic at data-related conferences this year, and the question I get asked most often is, “where do we start?” Followed closely by how do we do it, what skills do we need, how do we convince the rest of the organisation to get
There has been a lot of speculation over the years about the quality of the optimization solvers in SAS/OR, in particular the mixed integer linear optimization (MILP) solver. Measuring the performance of optimization solvers and comparing different solvers on a test set is a crucial part of modern optimization solver development.
Let me make this clear right from the start: I needed to answer 44 of the 62 exam questions correctly to earn my BASE SAS Programmer certification, and I got exactly 44 right. No margin of error. I never thought I’d be proud of a 70%, but I’m more than
Displaying nicely rendered axis values reduces clutter and makes the graph more readable. With SAS 9.4, we added the ability for splitting x-axis tick values on white space to create a nice and readable x-axis as shown in the graph on the right. It is always a challenge to fit
In some applications, you need to optimize a linear objective function of many variables, subject to linear constraints. Solving this problem is called linear programming or linear optimization. This article shows two ways to solve linear programming problems in SAS: You can use the OPTMODEL procedure in SAS/OR software or
A multilabel format enables you to assign multiple labels to a value or a range of values. The capability to add multilabel formats was added to the FORMAT procedure in SAS® 8.2. You assign multiple labels by specifying the MULTILABEL option in the VALUE statement of PROC FORMAT. For example,
"Two weeks to go," Santa said to himself, with millions of toys stacked up on the shelves. Each year worry hit at the same time – "How do I get the right toy to the right child without losing my mind?" Though Old St. Nick didn't have a computer science degree, deep down
I recently met Mrs. Claus at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, where we got to talking about the social network analysis session she’d just attended. It turns out Mrs. Claus and I are both fans of a book by Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Apparently
During a data quality assessment, one of my clients discovered that a large chunk of data that ultimately fed into their business analytics engine was sourced externally. After examining the contracts surrounding this data, I found that 100% of it failed to possess service-level agreements (SLAs) for the quality of
Ready for another (soon to be classic) fun, custom-made for IT holiday jingle?? Fire up the hot chocolate, gather around the water cooler and belt this one out at the upcoming office party: Have a holly, jolly smart grid It's about time we upgraded our electric infrastructure I don't know
Some observant readers may have noticed a new icon on the right sidebar of this blog announcing the release of the new SAS Press book on the ODS Graphics Designer, written in collaboration with Jeanette Bottitta. Jeanette is a Technical Writer at SAS and has worked on various SAS Graphics products
Imagine making $50K a day out of thin air. Did you know that NASDAQ routinely processes around 10,000,000 trades a day? What if instead of rounding cents for each transaction, market makers truncated fractions of cents in the amount they owe you? Under the assumption that each transaction, on average,
The financial crisis led to a deep reflection on the things that Banks and other financial institutions were doing wrong. The most significant factor that led to bad business decisions and in extend the results that we have all been experiencing the past few years, was uninformed analytics. This is
“Analytics” and “data scientist” aren’t new terms, but they are trending buzzwords. The popularity of these concepts has created a false impression: Analytics are mysterious abstractions that can only be decoded if you have a white lab coat and an advanced degree in computer science. The reality couldn’t be more different.
Have you ever thought how many problems in your business can be solved through analytics? I bet you stumble on that thought at least once a month but I'm also confident that maybe you see the thing in different terms. Let me put it like that: have you ever noticed strange patterns
I was surprised to learn recently that despite the reams of laws and policies directing the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) across industries and government agencies, more than 50 million Medicare beneficiaries were issued cards with a Medicare Beneficiary Number that's based on their Social Security Number (SSN). That's
We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who donated their leftover (and excess) Halloween candy this year, you outdid yourselves!! We tipped the scales right at 450 pounds of candy!
Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow. "Snow-flakes" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Happy holidays to all my readers! In my last post I showed
Clinical research generates extensive amounts of data, yet most of it is siloed or generally unavailable to a larger pool of willing potential researchers. If this data were liberated to the masses, we would venture into a world of endless possibilities where the search for new cures and treatments could
Last week, I attended the IALP 2016 conference (20th International Conference on Asian Language Processing) in Taiwan. After the conference, each presenter received a u-disk with all accepted papers in PDF format. So when I got back to Beijing, I began going through the papers to extend my learning. Usually, when
Editor's note: Amanda Farnsworth is Head of Visual Journalism at BBC News and a featured speaker at SAS Global Forum 2017, April 2-5, 2017 in Orlando. My days are spent trying to put the best content we can in front of our loyal, heartland audience, while reaching out to others,
You've probably seen dramatic pictures in the news lately about the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline - Native Americans versus bulldozers, protesters and tipis in a blizzard, and things like that. But do you really know much about this pipeline? For example, where will it go, and where have the
