Once upon a time, the only way to buy and sell advertising inventory was based on the relationship between advertiser and publisher. The exchange was manual, with advertisers paying publishers an agreed-upon price for every impression. The process involved a lot of phone calls, spreadsheets, negotiation and re-negotiation, all of
When social media first came along, there was a lot of hand-wringing about how this would see the end of face-to-face experiences. Everyone would be too immersed in digital technology to bother going out into the ‘real’ world. We would conduct our lives without leaving home, whether working or socializing.
Today, I was in a conversation about using Hadoop (a big data platform) for master data management (MDM). I still find it amazing when we have the discussion of what systems feed another system. Many of our friends have spent years creating MDM for customer, product, etc. with success. I'm a
In the spirit of our “40 and forward” theme to celebrate 40 years of SAS, this blog focuses on David Dickey, an accomplished SAS user since 1974 and a SAS instructor since 1981. He actually co-wrote the original Time Series SAS course in 1981, and helped with the most recent
Following a vegan diet? Allergic to eggs? Or in the middle of baking your favorite recipe only to realize you’re out of eggs? Fortunately, there are numerous egg substitutes you can use that you likely have in your pantry or fridge.
A kernel density estimate (KDE) is a nonparametric estimate for the density of a data sample. A KDE can help an analyst determine how to model the data: Does the KDE look like a normal curve? Like a mixture of normals? Is there evidence of outliers in the data? In
You've seen the terms #squadgoals or #lifegoals - to me, one #worklifebalancegoal is to be able to have time to volunteer outside of work. I could go on about the importance of service and how we are all connected but will have to save that soapbox for a different blog/time. From a happiness
In my last post, I talked about how to observe the impact of modernisation through a data quality lens. I asked you to consider the quality of your legacy data and what that means on the "shiny new toy" you intend to buy in the future. In this post, I
One of my favorite quotes is: "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet" - Abe Lincoln, 1868. And that is especially true when it comes to graphs and statistics. Hardly a day goes by without me seeing a bad graph that misrepresents the data (either intentionally or unintentionally) .
There was a recent comment on the original 'Unbox Your Box Plots', where a user wants to see the original data for the box, but only label the outliers. As noted in the comment, labeling all the scatter markers and turning on the outlier display is not ideal. But there
SAS Business Data Network is SAS’ solution for managing glossaries of common business terms. This is part of the SAS Data Governance offering as well as bundled with Advanced versions of all SAS Data Management bundles. One thing that is important regarding Data Governance in general, and this solution in
SAS is kicking off a new event Sept. 12-14 in Las Vegas called the Analytics Experience. It’s actually not completely new. In the past, we’ve held our annual Analytics and Premier Business Leadership Series conferences in the fall. But as the industry landscape continues to change – SAS continues to
Ever hear the phrase: "If the mountain won't come to you, you must go to the mountain"? Well, at SAS, we bring the mountain to you. The Analytics Fast Track™ for SAS®, affectionately called “rolling SAS,” is a partner program between SAS and Intel that showcases the incredible performance of
Last week I read an interesting paper by Bob Rodriguez: "Statistical Model Building for Large, Complex Data: Five New Directions in SAS/STAT Software." In it, Rodriguez summarizes five modern techniques for building predictive models and highlights recent SAS/STAT procedures that implement those techniques. The paper discusses the following high-performance (HP)
This weekend I was reviewing my portfolio of stocks as usual. Yes, I do have a small stock portfolio with a few stocks, and normally I use free stock charting software to review the stock plots. These sites allow you to view the daily stock prices along with many technical
Slack is a tremendously popular app for team collaboration. At its core, it's an open messaging app that allows team members to communicate with each other in real time. It works well with "startup"-style teamwork, which requires constant communication among people who aren't always located together. I've heard a lot
The Internet of Things (or IoT, as some like to call it) holds a number of benefits for many organizations: revenue growth, smarter decision making and efficiency. Experts are predicting anywhere from 20 to 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020. That’s almost here! Are you
In DataFlux Data Management Studio, the predominate component of the SAS Data Quality bundle, the data quality nodes in a data job use definitions from something called the SAS Quality Knowledge Base (QKB). The QKB supports over 25 languages and provides a set of pre-built rules, definitions and reference data
With the Pokémon Go craze sweeping the world, techies and programmers are looking to apply their skills to gain an advantage over the average user. In this blog post, I show how to use some of SAS' geospatial analytics capabilities to capture a Pikachu. Let's say you know of a building that has
One of the things I’ve come to love most about DS2 is the tight integration with SQL which makes so many data prep chores so much less onerous. An example is DATA program BY group processing. With a traditional DATA step, you must first sort or index the source data
.@philsimon with some recommendations on modernization.
In June, my husband and I completed this silly race called Storm the Beach – totally out of my norm, it was only 5 miles :) and included things like climbing, crawling, wading through the ocean, balancing, rope swinging, and running through soft sand. It was nuts, but so fun, and
I'm addicted to you. You're a hard habit to break. Such a hard habit to break. — Chicago, "Hard Habit To Break" Habits are hard to break. For more than 20 years I've been putting semicolons at the end of programming statements in SAS, C/C++, and Java/Javascript. But lately I've been
What would it be like if the US was in the EU? I don't know how that would work out politically, but this map shows how it might look geographically (if the US was literally picked up and moved to Europe!) My buddy Rick Langston is a bit of a
At this stage, our organization has defined business objectives for Data Governance programme and shares business term definitions which it uses. This logical area of data and information management has been supplemented with a bridge to technical metadata – in the previous step we obtained one place, which combines the
The rapid growth of the digital economy has put it on course to account for 25 percent of the world’s entire economy by 2020. Platform business models represent a large proportion of the overall total but what do we mean by platform? MIT Professor Michael Cusumano defines it as follows:
Modernization is a term used to describe the necessary evolution of information technologies that organizations rely on to remain competitive in today’s constantly changing business world. New technologies – many designed to better leverage big data – challenge existing data infrastructures and business models. This forces enterprises to modernize their approach to data
One of my favorite new features in PROC SGPLOT in SAS 9.4m2 is addition of the COLORRESPONSE= and COLORMODEL= options to the SCATTER statement. By using these options, it is easy to color markers in a scatter plot so that the colors indicate the values of a continuous third variable.
Design thinking is, broadly speaking, allowing user experience, or even users, to drive design. It’s a profoundly human-centered process, with commentators using words like ‘collaborate’, ‘experience’, and even ‘empathy’ in their descriptions. Steve Jobs is said to have used it in creating the iPod and iPhone, because it brings together
As often is the case, this article is prompted by a recent post on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics page communities page. A user wanted to create a Graph Table showing a bar chart with tabular data for each of the category values along the x-axis. The user was creatively using
