I guess a coding dinosaur is someone who uses an old/legacy computer language, or at least a language that isn't en vogue these days. Coding dinosaurs are still around (and probably will be for a while), whereas the real dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago are extinct. What caused
The little SAS program’s official name was Extract_Transform_Load_ 0314.sas. But, that name was much too formal, way too long, and did not roll off of the tongue very easily at all. So, everybody simply called her: ETL Pi. ETL Pi was conceived in a 2-hour project strategy meeting in conference
Last week I showed a timeline of living US presidents. The number of living presidents is constant during the time interval between inaugurations and deaths of presidents. The data was taken from a Wikipedia table (shown below) that shows the number of years and days between events. This article shows
The Foresight Practitioner Conference returns to Raleigh, NC (November 15-16), with a theme of "Recoupling Forecasting with Inventory Control and Supply Planning." This event is produced jointly by Foresight and the North Carolina State University Institute for Advanced Analytics, and deals with an important topic. Too often we consider forecasting
An idiom is a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words. For example, "don't cry over spilled milk," or "the cat is out of the bag." Idioms are fun to use, and fun to hear - don't you agree? And
Ivor Moan explains how SAS Data Management software can help you address GDPR requirements.
When a busy university analytics team is tasked with creating a new, interactive way to share data with dozens of different constituents, data visualization from SAS is the obvious answer. The University of Idaho’s office of Institutional Effectiveness and Accreditation is the source for comprehensive information, analyses and university statistics.
In the Tuscan hilltop village of Montepulciano, a tourist can visit the shop of Coppersmith Cesare Mazzetti. But Mazzetti is not just running his family’s traditional business, he’s demonstrating all the qualities of a historic craftsman. The visitor may see him work and have him show you photographs of some of
Jim Harris explains why data quality is such a fundamental aspect of master data management.
May is Global Employee Health and Fitness Month (GEHFM) and to help recognize the efforts of getting {and keeping} employees happy, healthy and fit, SAS is hosting a 1 Day Clean Eating Challenge on Thursday, May 18th. (If you are participating in GEHFM activities, this counts as one point!)
A SAS customer asked how to simulate data from a three-parameter lognormal distribution as specified in the PROC UNIVARIATE documentation. In particular, he wanted to incorporate a threshold parameter into the simulation. Simulating lognormal data is easy if you remember an important fact: if X is lognormally distributed, then Y=log(X)
Water is in the news more & more lately - people seem to either have too much, or too little, at any given time. Therefore being able to plot rivers and lakes on a map could be a very useful skill to add to your graphical bag of tricks. A few
Recently, while browsing health care data, I came across the graph shown below. The graph includes the healthy life expectancy at birth by countries in the EU, along with the associated per capita expenditure. The graph also shows estimate of potential gain in life expectancy by increasing expenditure efficiency. The
When we built our house in Durham ten years ago, I asked the builder if I could make a special request. He was very accommodating. He said he had heard it all. “Can you install a switch to turn off the doorbell?” That he had not heard. His response, “Why
What do you get when you combine analytics, aviation and the Internet of Things? A learning experience that leaves everyone flying high! At Data on the Fly, 25 area high school students had the opportunity to learn how technology has changed – and continues to change – the aviation industry.
Microservices are a key component of the SAS Viya architecture. In this post, I’ll introduce and explain the benefits of microservices. In a future post we’ll dig deeper into the microservices architecture. What are microservices? When we look at SAS Viya architecture diagrams, we can find, among the new core components,
David Loshin discusses two common roadblocks in moving Hadoop from proof-of-concept to production.
Quick! What is the next term in the numerical sequence 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 4, ...? If you said '3', then you must be an American history expert, because that sequence represents the number of living US presidents beginning with Washington's inauguration on 30APR1789 and
In his recent article Perceptions of probability, Rick Wicklin explores how vague statements about "likeliness" translate into probabilities that we can express numerically. It's a fun, informative post -- I recommend it! You'll "Almost Certainly" enjoy it. To prepare the article, Rick first had to download the source data from
As SAS Viya has been gaining awareness over the past year among SAS users, there has been a lot of discussion about how SAS’ Cloud Analytic Server (CAS) handles memory vs SAS’ previous technologies such as LASR and HPA. Recently, while I was involved in delivering several SAS Viya enablement
Work Life has chosen the theme “Wholehearted Living” for Employee Health and Fitness month. In her book, “The Gifts of Imperfection”, Brene Brown sets down 10 guideposts for Wholehearted Living. They are all relevant and timely for me, but ultimately I decided to choose one to focus on during the
Kim Kaluba describes how a customer data strategy can help you achieve an omnichannel vision.
Stretches shoulders, hamstrings and calves while strengthening arms, core and back; Calms the mind! Dolphin Pose (Sanskrit: Ardha Pincha Mayurasana) Start on hands and knees with toes curled under – wrists under shoulders and hips over knees. Core is engaged and drawing in towards spine. Shoulder blades are sliding down
SAS Visual Analytics 7.4 comes chock-full of new features. Report and section linking come with an added benefit. If you set up linking from one section to another section in the same report, or from one report to another report, you have the option to configure linking such that any filter
In the second post of the 10 Commandments of Applied Econometrics series we discussed the issue of embedding statistical tools in the context of business problems. Today, I will present another commandment related to exploration and inspecting the data.
Joyce Norris-Montanari poses the question: Is Hadoop/big data technology actually ready for MDM?
While attending SAS Global Forum, a user asked me about creating a map with a zoomed inset map. This is a topic many users might be interested in, so I decided to create an example and share it. But first, I had to decide which map to use. I thought
I recently saw an interesting data visualization on the flowingdata website, which analyzed & compared the causes of fatal crashes in the US, by month and time-of-day. At first I thought it was a really cool visualization, but after I studied it a while, I realized that I had misinterpreted
If a financial analyst says it is "likely" that a company will be profitable next year, what probability would you ascribe to that statement? If an intelligence report claims that there is "little chance" of a terrorist attack against an embassy, should the ambassador interpret this as a one-in-a-hundred chance,
When I first wrote this blog post in early May 2017, it was to ask SAS users holding SAS “Big Data” certifications to participate in the CertMag Salary Survey Plus Big Data Edition. The response was overwhelming and thanks to all of you that participated. Now that the results are in, I wanted
