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
Last week I showed how to use the simple bootstrap to randomly resample from the data to create B bootstrap samples, each containing N observations. The simple bootstrap is equivalent to sampling from the empirical cumulative distribution function (ECDF) of the data. An alternative bootstrap technique is called the smooth
Foster youth present a unique challenge to educators. Probably the most famous former foster care child in the world right now is Simone Biles, already one of the more formidable and successful athletes in the history of American sports. As a big fan of women’s gymnastics, Biles has thrilled me with her accomplishments.
"Tap into all your demand signals. Organize. Visualize. Analyze. Predict. Orchestrate. Optimize." The availability and collection of data are compelling companies to invest in demand signal management solutions to take advantage of the vast amount of information to support their planning processes. However, many have not gotten the return on
Since this is an election year, I've been scrutinizing the voter registration data. One thing that surprised me is there are more female voters registered in NC than males. I wondered if this was consistent across all 100 counties, and created some charts to help visualize the data... First I went
Last week I was visiting San Diego for the SANDS conference. I always enjoy this conference as I get to interact closely with the users to hear of their pains and innovative solutions to creating Clinical Graphs. In the conference Ed Barber asked about displaying A1c data along with some
Reference lines on a visualization are used to help identify goals or targets, acceptable or unacceptable ranges, etc; basically any metric that puts a frame of reference around the values on the visualization. The Percent of Total of a metric is used to help identify a part-to-whole relationship. It answers
Companies launch initiatives to upgrade or improve their sales & operations planning and demand planning processes all the time, but many fail to deliver the results they should. Has your forecasting operation fallen short of expectations? Do you struggle with "best practices" that seem incapable of producing accurate, useful results?
What does it really mean when we talk about the concept of a data asset? For the purposes of this discussion, let's say that a data asset is a manifestation of information that can be monetized. In my last post we explored how bringing many data artifacts together in a
Last week I showed some features of SAS formats, including the fact that you can use formats to bin a continuous variable without creating a new variable in the DATA step. During the discussion I mentioned that it can be confusing to look at the output of a formatted variable
Has there ever been an app that’s captured the world’s imagination as quickly as Pokemon Go? The usage statistics are mind-blowing, and whether or not the world has reached “peak Pokemon Go” yet, this will doubtless be a short-lived fad. But this could be the app that brings augmented reality and
There's an old expression "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" - and while that expression probably isn't universally true (as pointed out in this interesting article), I think having a way to quantify your stress could be useful. I recently read an interesting article about the Holmes-Rahe Life
A colleague approached me with this very important business problem: Every Friday at SAS HQ, SAS cafe staff provides a breakfast goodie in our breakrooms. Often the supplied goodie is delicious, but sometimes it's more...well...healthy. I want to know whether I should eat my breakfast before I leave home on
