A number of years ago I was driving home to Alabama for the holidays. Typical of the season the driving was not easy. It was getting dark early and the traffic was fairly heavy. I had the radio on to pass the time. A talk show was on and the
If you are a SAS Administrator who is tasked with managing SAS users including adding and removing SAS users in the SAS Management Console, assigning (or re-assigning) them to Groups and Roles, maintaining their General information and user Accounts, then you know that when number of users grow, at some
With the New Year also comes new beginnings and feelings of a clean slate. With that fresh start, many of us have high hopes of cleaning up our diets and eating more nutritious foods. You’ve probably heard all about the importance of replacing processed carbs with intact, whole grains and
Recently I blogged about how to compute a weighted mean and showed that you can use a weighted mean to compute the center of mass for a system of N point masses in the plane. That led me to think about a related problem: computing the center of mass (called
Let us start the new year by taking a trip back in history to SAS 9.2, first released in 2008, and the first SAS release that included the new ODS Graphics software including GTL and SG procedures. While we have recently released the third maintenance on SAS 9.4 (SAS 9.40M3),
What if a reckless driver adopted a more responsible approach because the car insurance pricing was based on driving habits? What if the senior from next door had the insurance payments based on kilometres driven, resulting in significant savings? This may be reality sooner than you think. The Internet of Things will revolutionise
.@philsimon on the need to play offense and defense with your organization's data.
When SAS Scotland gave students 48 hours to build a prototype computer system to help increase police effectiveness, nine teams accepted the challenge. The venue was the University of Glasgow's Hackathon, one of the largest student hackathons in the UK, attracting 200 attendees. SAS Scotland has co-sponsored the event for the past three
When I walk into my local chicken shop I always feel that Mary, the owner, has roasted chickens, prepared salads and put on extra rice pudding for my family’s Friday night meal. Mary welcomes me with open arms, greets me and my son by first name and always has an
What strategy do you use to pick your lottery numbers? Do you suspect that the future winning numbers might be somehow related to the past winning numbers? If so, this blog's for you! The Powerball lottery jackpot is up to about $1.4 billion - the largest lottery jackpot there has
I began 2016 by compiling a list of popular articles from my blog in 2015. This "People's Choice" list contains many interesting articles, but some of my personal favorites did not make the list. Today I present the "Editor's Choice" list of articles that deserve a second look. I've grouped
When my band first started and was in need of a sound system, we bought a pair of cheap yet indestructible Peavey speakers, some Radio Shack microphones and a power mixer. The result? We sounded awful and often split our ear drums from high-pitched feedback and raw, untrained vocals. It took us years
If you install, update, manage or maintain a SAS deployment, you're a SAS administrator, and a very valuable resource for your organization. Every day, SAS users at your company depend on you to do their job. Being a SAS administrator is a critical and rewarding role, but it can sometimes be a lonely one as
Has analytics become just a buzzword, the hype du jour? It’s great that analytics are now cool, but few people have taken then time to understand what analytics really are and how they can help solve their business problems. Last month at the the 30th Annual International Maintenance Conference, I
Whenever I am feeling down, I can always guarantee that going for a run, horseback riding, hiking with friends, or teaching a group exercise class will instantly lift my mood. Can a few minutes on the treadmill make your emotional problems disappear? Most likely not. However, a regular exercise routine
It’s hard to believe that another year is over. 2015 is behind us; 2016 is ahead. As I looked back over this year, I recalled starting last year at the National Retail Federation Big Show. I presented in the SAS booth on “Optimizing Pricing Decisions.” The presentation was simple and used the concept of
Weighted averages are all around us. Teachers use weighted averages to assign a test more weight than a quiz. Schools use weighted averages to compute grade-point averages. Financial companies compute the return on a portfolio as a weighted average of the component assets. Financial charts show (linearly) weighted moving averages
.@philsimon begins a four-part series on the need for a proper data strategy.
Next week I will begin facilitating a six-session class, “Preparing for the Teen Years”. I have taught this class more than two dozen times and each time I do it, I learn something about the topic of parenting teens…and about myself. One truth I have learned over the years as
Despite many experts touting 2016 as a significant year for innovation, IT is still chaotic, with many teams stuck in an old world. Organisations are implementing countless digital and data projects in an attempt to improve business models and streamline processes. Sadly, these rarely reflect any kind of coherent company-wide IT
In this two-part series, which posts as the calendar turns to a new year, I revisit the top data management topics of 2015 (Part 1) and then try to predict a few of the data management trends of 2016 (Part 2). Data management in 2016 The Internet of Things (IoT) made significant
2015 was a busy year for the hotel industry. ADR, Occupancy and RevPAR achieved record highs. We saw extensive merger and acquisition activity, culminating at the end of the year with the acquisition of Starwood by Marriot and Fairmont by Accor (and don’t forget Expedia’s Orbitz acquisition, of course). Favorable
Whether your New Year’s resolution is to get SAS certified or to become a more advanced SAS programmer, we’ve got you covered with these upcoming SAS Press books, many of which will be making their bookshelf debut at SAS® Global Forum 2016 in fabulous Las Vegas! The SAS® Programmer’s PROC
I wrote 114 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2015. Which were the most popular with readers? In general, highly technical articles appeal to only a small group of readers, whereas less technical articles appeal to a larger audience. Consequently, many of my popular articles were related to data
In this two-part series, which posts as the calendar prepares to turn 2015 into 2016, I revisit the top data management topics of 2015 (Part 1) and then try to predict a few of the data management trends of 2016 (Part 2). Data management in 2015 Big data continued to make
In my recent posts, I've been exploring the issues of integrating data that originates from beyond the organization. But this post looks at a different facet of extra-enterprise data management: data availability. In many organizations, there's a growing trend of making internal analytical data accessible to external consumers. I can
In my last blog I discussed purging audit records from the Web Infrastructure Platform SharedServices database. The blog generated a fair bit of discussion around the SAS Visual Analytics auditing data gathering and archive process. So let’s take a step back and in this blog review how data collection for auditing works and
An interesting question came up recently, where a colleague wanted to create a bar line chart with Revenue on the Y axis and Profit on the Y2 axis. The Revenues were all positive, but the Profit had positive and negative values. Some data I generated is shown on the right. Creating this
How many times have you gone onto a website, put a few things in a shopping cart, and then exited the Internet? I do it all the time. Sometimes when I log on to that site during my next visit, those same items are still in my cart – ready for purchase. I find
As an economist, I started at SAS with a disadvantage when it comes to predictive modeling. After all, like most economists, I was taught how to estimate marginal effects of various programs, or treatment effects, with non-experimental data. We use a variety of identification assumptions and quasi-experiments to make causal
