Often I have written articles that are motivated by some question by a user on how to create a particular graph, or how to work around some shortcoming in the feature set to create the graph you need. This time, I got a question about Clinical Graphs that were mostly working
When I attended my first SAS conference in 2003 I was not only a first-timer, I was a first time presenter. Needless to say I was a bit nervous. I did not know what to expect. Was my topic good enough for these savvy programmers and statisticians? Well my first
Leading up to the Analytics Experience conference, we're going to explore the big trends, hot topics and what's ahead in the industry with some of the companies leading the way. I had the chance to interview David Septoff, CEO of Zencos to get his take on what you need to know about
Some organizations I visit don’t seem to have changed their analytics technology environment much since the early days of IT. I often encounter companies with 70s-era base statistical packages running on mainframes or large servers, data warehouses (originated in the 80s), and lots of reporting applications. These tools usually continue
First, if you landed on this topic because you encountered this SAS message: ERROR 180-322: Statement is not valid or it is used out of proper order. ...then I'll tell you right now: you've probably left off a semicolon in one of your SAS statements. If you're lucky, the SAS
Have you ever wondered how far you live from the closest nuclear power plant? I've crunched the numbers for cities here in the US, and created an interactive SAS map to help answer that question! The average age of US nuclear power plants is 35 years, and there just doesn't
Two years ago, I found myself the proud, first-time owner of a garage. My wife and I quickly started to add new items to the garage – a battery-powered lawn mower, two beach cruisers and four Tommy Bahama beach chairs. They were stored with ease. What a fantastic world I'd been missing out on. But it wasn't long before we outstripped our
.@philsimon continues his series on data prep and anlytics.
As Zika starts spreading into the US, it will be important to have a way to track it. Therefore I wrote some SAS code to pull the latest data from the CDC website, and plot it on a map... But before we get into the details of my map, I
If you are new to eating real foods or are just trying to eat less processed foods, you may have initially thought that real food is bland. But I promise, eating real food doesn’t have to mean plain chicken breast and steamed broccoli. There are plenty of great, easy
Edmond Halley (1656-1742) is best known for computing the orbit and predicting the return of the short-period comet that bears his name. However, like many scientists of his era, he was involved in a variety of mathematical and scientific activities. One of his mathematical contributions is a numerical method for
In our previous post, Econometric and statistical methods for spatial data analysis, we discussed the importance of spatial data. For most people, understanding that importance is relatively easy because spatial data are often found in our daily lives and we are all accustomed to analyzing them. We can all relate to
In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert paraphrases a famous quote by Richard Bach when she writes, "Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them". That saying is now on a sticky note at my desk and a reminder to reflect on the excuses I make for myself.
Tablets, phablets, smartphones. These mobile devices not only travel to different corners of the earth with their owners; they participate in certain adventures that can result in an unexpected turn of events. Thanks to their mobility, these devices can be misplaced. And they could be found later. In rare cases,
Yes, I read the baby books. I visited the websites. I swaddled a football. I was prepared. When my daughter came into the world last year there was a small comfort that I had done about all I could do to prepare for her arrival. I say a small comfort
Gender and race discrimination has been banned in most countries for many years, although gender did have specific exclusions for the insurance industry, where the risk for males and females could be shown to substantially different (e.g. females have a higher life expectancy than males). In the European Union (EU)
After posting a couple of blogs on the subject of dates and date formats in Visual Analytics Designer, I got a question from a user who wondered how to compare data for a selected date to data from the same day of the previous year. Here’s one way to do
A huge proportion of big data is unstructured text (such as client interactions, product reviews, call center logs, emails, blogs and tweets). Organizations starting to invest in advanced analytics often overlook the value text analytics could add to the process. But when data scientists or analysts get to work exploring
In my last post, I talked about how data still needs to be cleaned up – and data strategy still needs to be re-evaluated – as we start to work with nontraditional databases and other new technologies. There are lots of ways to use these new platforms (like Hadoop). For example, many
It is easy to use PROC SGPLOT and BY-group processing to create an animated graph in SAS 9.4. Sanjay Matange previously discussed how to create an animated plot in SAS 9.4, but he used a macro loop to call PROC SGPLOT many times. It is often easier to use the
Book Review in Journal of Business Forecasting The Summer 2016 issue of Journal of Business Forecasting includes a book review of Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions. The review is by Simon Clarke, Group Director of Forecasting at The Coca-Cola Company. You may be familiar with Clarke's many previous contributions
If you are using the second maintenance release of SAS 9.3 (TS1M2) or later, you might have noticed that you have several map-related libraries that are defined for you. The MAPS library contains the old map data sets that have been provided with SAS/GRAPH® software for many years. The source
Ever wanted to test out the latest SAS® technology on your own data, but lacked the time or administrative backing of IT to make that happen? Ever wanted to test drive Hadoop with your own data and SAS® but are lacking the support or skills to do that? If I piqued
In 1967, just a short time before a group of graduate students at North Carolina State University (NCSU) were starting a software company they called SAS, Dr. Salah Elmaghraby joined the faculty of NCSU as a Distinguished University Professor. In the 1970s, Dr. Elmaghraby led the effort to create one
If you're into 1980s pop music, then I bet you love Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire. But do you know every word, and the significance of every reference? Let's use SAS software to create an interactive visualization that will help you fully understand this song! I first saw
It’s back to school time again. If you’re working to get your lesson plans in place, we have something that might help you and your students - Exercises and Projects for The Little SAS Book. This book is perfect for instructors and students in a classroom setting, especially when used
You could say we've been working toward the internet of things (IoT) since computers were first invented. Look at how airplanes have changed from flying by wire to now, quite literally, flying by IoT (or connected plane). The connected car is another example of how big data analytics is the
My computer geek colleagues are boasting about their humble beginnings by sharing lists of their first seven programming languages. You can find these under the hashtag #FirstSevenLanguages. COBOLPL/1SASIFPSAPL370 AssemblerCSQLLisp#FirstSevenLanguages — Paul Kent (@hornpolish) August 16, 2016 From what I've seen of these lists, the programming languages that appear are very
I'm hard-pressed to think of a trendier yet more amorphous term today than analytics. It seems that every organization wants to take advantage of analytics, but few really are doing that – at least to the extent possible. This topic interests me quite a bit, and I hope to explore
This week, we have a NEW author! Introducing Dany Losh, a Senior Manager at the RFC. Dany as enjoyed working at the RFC for over 25 years sharing her passion of recreation and fitness with SAS employees and currently manages our Recreation, Leisure, and On-Site Services Team. Today Dany is
