I brushed aside some sawdust on the workbench and set my laptop down. It wasn’t really mine. SAS Library Services had kindly lent me a new laptop for the “Making Sense of Sensor Data” workshop at UNC’s BEaM Makerspace. I had just set the laptop down…in sawdust. Like any normal
With a major election coming next year, I was wondering if there have been any shifts & changes in the voters in my state. This seems like an interesting opportunity for some data analysis, eh!?! To get you into the spirit of elections, here's an "I Voted" sticker from my friend
As I visit my clients, it sometimes surprises me when they avoid the use of PROC REPORT. “It’s too different”. Even those that do use it, often fail to take advantage of the procedure’s power by ignoring the compute block. Yes this procedure is different from any other. Yes using
This summer, I had several interesting sessions with customers and prospects. Much to my surprise, two of them, both multinational organizations, were doing most of their data related tasks in Excel. This happens every now and then -- I come across organizations (like yours?) where people are manipulating and ‘analysing’
I feel like I'm singing a song called Data in the Sky – With Options! The cloud is forever in our minds these days as a lower cost option because it requires fewer resources to address our data needs. Cloud solutions are an increasing part of many organizations' budgets every year. Whether enterprise data is
With over 1,000,000 words in the English language, why is it that we tend to use the same words over & over? This blog shows a hierarchical approach to help you branch out and choose more descriptive words. But first, to get you into the mood for a blog about
After several years of visiting the wine country of California, my husband and I have grown to love Sonoma Valley – it’s climate, it’s laid back atmosphere, it’s sustainability mindset, and of course, the Wine. Yes, Napa Valley is the big dog in wine country where most of the large
The phrase “business rules” is often loosely used. It can refer to things like constraints in a query, a data mapping, a data quality constraint, a data transformation, or a model. Business rules also reflect an enforced policy, a regulatory requirement and business constraints on model scores that trigger analytically-driven
How much does this big pumpkin weigh? One of the cafeterias at SAS invited patrons to post their guesses on an internal social network at SAS. There was no prize for the correct guess; it was just a fun Halloween-week activity. I recognized this as an opportunity to apply the
SAS Press is now 25 years old! To commemorate this milestone, I decided to research a question that has fascinated me for years: Who was the first person outside of SAS Institute to write a book about SAS? I first heard about this controversy at the Western Users of SAS
I hope by now you’ve seen the movie “The Imitation Game” with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. It’s the true story of Alan Turing, whom many consider to be the father of the modern-day computer and the discipline of computer science. Turing’s innovation (and the movie) takes place in early
This post shares the story of a teacher and coach, and a student-athlete who was the first in his family to graduate college, attend graduate school, and aspires to become a Mathematics professor. It's the first entry in a blog series that will highlight some tremendous educators with whom I’ve
Having a mentor is the number one factor in increasing the steepness of your personal learning curve. So says my oldest, Garik, a Park Scholar at North Carolina State University (class of 2012), during a discussion he recently had with the incoming Park Scholar class of 2019. To accept the
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become the new It Girl of the IT world. Of course her big brother big data continues to generate big buzz. My sis from another miss Tamara Dull has blogged about the relationship between big data and IoT, positing big data is a subset of IoT on
By now, you’ve probably seen a video of a 3D printer discharging layers of plastic to create a model of a building or a plastic figurine. You may have heard stories about 3D printed guns, 3D printed airplane parts and even 3D printed body parts. While 3D printers are becoming more common, they are
SAS Visual Analytics contains an Administrator Overview report which provides for Visual Analytics usage information by application, user, and object. To provide data for the report you must enable collection of key actions audit data in the Visual Analytics Middle-Tier. Auditing doesn’t just apply to Visual Analytics, it can be
In SAS, the DATA step and PROC SQL support mnemonic logical operators. The Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT are used for evaluating logical expressions. The comparison operators are EQ (equal), NE (not equal), GT (greater than), LT (less than), GE (greater than or equal), and LE (less than or
Analytics claim this is the 20th most used word in English writing. What word, you might ask? This word. Which one? This one right here! You might think I'm trying to lead into an Abbott & Costello-style comedy routine, but I literally mean this word ... the word 'this'! As you can
If you turned in for my recent webinar, Machine Learning: Principles and Practice, you may have heard me talking about some of my favorite machine learning resources, including recent white papers and some classic studies. As I mentioned in the webinar, machine learning is not new. SAS has been pursuing
Do you have a great idea for an analytics project but need approval to get started? Or maybe you've had some initial successes with analytics and you're ready to expand the program. We talked to four analytics leaders in the higher education industry to get their advice on how to
The Internet of Things, event stream processing and wearable devices such as Apple Watch and FitBit, just to name a few, all have massive potential to meaningfully contribute to the broader health care world. They accomplish this by transmitting personal health data in near-real time in support of potential diagnosis
With so many cybersecurity stories and large scale data breaches in the news, it's no wonder that cybersecurity is a top priority for leaders in many industries. But did you know analytics can help protect your customer and organizational data? Franklin Witter, Principal CyberSecurity Consultant, recently shared these three cybersecurity
Endless Summer is both a surfing movie, and the idea that "if one had enough time and money it would be possible to follow the summer around the world, making it endless." Summer temperatures are fine if you're swimming & surfing, but I prefer slightly cooler temperatures - perhaps an
We all know that alerting is one of the most powerful features of SAS Environment Manager; the flexibility and comprehensiveness of this feature is one of the things that makes SAS EV stand out among monitoring tools. If we dig a little deeper, we find that we have quite a bit of
Like retailers, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) interact with customers in multiple ways during the buy, use and share journey. These interactions take place at stores and on websites, Facebook pages, call centers, and other channels. However, unlike retailers, CSPs are having a harder time providing a seamless experience across their many channels.
Of course it has not really been 25 years of SAS Press, but more like 30 or so. But it has been 25 years of the publishing of SAS books by SAS users. What started as “Books by Users” with only a few titles has grown into what is now
Working on a data migration project gives you a unique opportunity to learn where your organization has fallen short in its data management strategy. It's when you start to explore your legacy data landscape that you get a feel for how big a silo challenge your company has. It wasn't
The holiday countdown has begun. With less than 1 month until Thanksgiving and less than 2 months until Christmas, we are already beginning to plan out our holiday travel and family commitments. Often lost in the maze of planes, trains and automobiles (and feasts, gifts and holiday cheer), is physical
Statistical programmers often need to evaluate complicated expressions that contain square roots, logarithms, and other functions whose domain is restricted. Similarly, you might need to evaluate a rational expression in which the denominator of the expression can be zero. In these cases, it is important to avoid evaluating a function
Analyzing text is like a treasure hunt. It is hard to tell what you will end up with before you start digging and the things you find out can be quite unique, invaluable and in many cases full of surprises. It requires a good blend of instruments like business knowledge,
