Many of our authors often ask us where they can find real data that they can use without copyright or other confidentiality issues. Instructors too are always on the look-out for real-life data. Well, thanks to a new initiative supported by SAS, you can now access data from more than
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As a kid, I was always intrigued with UFO sightings and I guess I'm still a little that way ... therefore how could I not jump at the opportunity to explore some UFO sightings data! I guess "UFO" doesn't necessarily imply that something is an alien space ship - just
The gaming business moves fast. Casinos serve a multitude of entertainment options to thousands of patrons 24 hours a day, a pace that results in a myriad of interaction points with their patrons. Competition in this service industry is fierce. If patrons at a casino do not feel that
Do you “buy and build as you go” with your analytics architecture? Most companies do, and have for decades. The result is a heterogeneous environment for analytics with a variety of hardware, software, databases and analytical applications used in silos. There’s tremendous duplication of data and inconsistency in the analytical
Do you support a multilingual reporting audience? This is a fast-growing requirement for many of you, and now your SAS Visual Analytics reports can be easily configured to support any number of languages. From SAS Visual Analytics Designer, there is an option under the File menu called Localize Report. This
In part 1 of this series we looked at how to acquire personal data from the Internet of Things for our own exploration. But we found that the data was not yet ready for analysis, as is usually the case. In this part, we will look at how we can use SAS
Are you a VIEWTABLE fan from the SAS Windowing Environment (a.k.a. Display Manager, DMS, PC SAS)? If so, the latest version of SAS Enterprise Guide has a new feature that you'll love. With the latest update to SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 (7.11), you can now subset your data in the
Perhaps you saw the headlines earlier this week about the fact that it has been nine years since the last major hurricane (category 3, 4, or 5) hit the US coast. According to a post on the GeoSpace blog, which is published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), researchers ran
Many colleagues and customers at SAS Global Forum ask me, why I write books beside having a full-time job as SAS consultant and being lecturer at universities. Valid question. SUSTAINABILITY. I have been working in so many analysis projects in different domains and industries. Some of them were longer, others were
@philsimon on the need to adopt new tools to understand events.
Do you ever wonder why those pesky little stickers are on fruits and vegetables? Other than to annoy us while trying to meticulously peel them off without leaving behind sticky glue? Those stickers are called price look-up or PLU codes and they actually do serve a purpose and can help
I always learn something new when I attend SAS Global Forum, and it often results from an informal conversations in The Quad or in a hallway. Last week a SAS customer described a scenario that he wanted to implement as part of an analysis of some genetic data. To oversimplify
SGF 2015 was a blast with a focus on Visual Analytics, SAS Studio, Hadoop and more. Graphs were everywhere, and it was a banner year for ODS Graphics with over 15 papers and presentations by users on creating graphs using SG Procedures, GTL and Designer. Dan Heath, Prashant Hebbar, Scott
In recent releases of SAS, you can use Output Delivery System graphics or 'ODS graphics on' to produce nice graphical output for most of the analytic procedures. These default graphs are nice, but when you want your graphs to look "a certain way" SAS also lets you create your own custom graphs!
Actually, luck had little to do with it. The twenty two recipients of Student Scholarship and Junior Professional Awards are attending the Pharmaceutical Industry SAS Users Group (PharmaSUG) from May 17-20 because of their qualifications. This marks the fifth year that PharmaSUG has offered these special programs, which are funded
Over the past year and a half, there has been a subtle shift in media attention from big data analytics to what is referred to as the Internet of Things, or IoT for short. The shift in focus is not intended to diminish the value of big data platforms and
I've written about how to use the FILENAME ZIP method to read and update ZIP files in your SAS programs. The ZIP method was added in SAS 9.4, and its advantage is that you can accomplish more in SAS without having to launch external utilities such as WinZip, gunzip, or
A common task in data analysis is to locate observations that satisfy multiple criteria. For example, you might want to locate all zip codes in certain counties within specified states. The SAS DATA step contains the powerful WHERE statement, which enables you to extract a subset of data that satisfy
Everything’s bigger in Texas and that definitely held true at SAS Global Forum 2015. The conference was bigger and busier than ever, especially for the education industry. There were so many amazing presentations and announcements, that you may have missed a few -- here are the highlights. We had a several customer presentations on SAS Visual
I’m headed to Orlando, May 17- 20, for the annual PharmaSUG conference. PharmaSUG is the Pharmaceutical Industry SAS Users Group, consisting of professionals worldwide in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries who use SAS software in their work. I will be at the SAS Publications booth in the demo room and
We have all heard the old joke about the person who sidles up to a doctor at a party and describes in great detail a medical problem a "friend" is having in order to get free medical advice. It could just as easily be a person buttonholing an accountant for
Once you have assessed the types of reporting and analytics projects and activities are to be done by the community of data analysts and consumers and have assessed their business needs and requirements for performance, you can then evaluate – with confidence – how different platforms and tools can be combined to satisfy
Data governance and data virtualization can become powerful allies. The word governance is not be understood here as a law but more as a support and vision for business analytics application. Our governance processes must become agile the same way our business is transforming. Data virtualization, being a very versatile
Everyone loves a “mental health” day, one of those days when we get to relax and escape from the everyday worries and stresses of life. Imagine the challenge of dealing with true mental health issues everyday – especially as a child or youth where mental health issues can cause isolation,
I was surprised to find that the size of the U.S. federal government is smaller today, than in the past many decades - let's graph it out, so it's easy to analyze... The way I got started on this little adventure was via Jishai's graph on dadaviz.com. Here's a snapshot
Have you noticed how your smart phone seems to know everything about you? Where you live, where you work, and even how long your daily commute will take! A lot of that information is generated by your daily activities while using your connected devices. There is much to be found by analyzing the
New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg made a new-year's resolution to learn code. Apple’s Steve Jobs said, “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” President Barrack Obama said, "Don't just buy a new video game, make one.
On Monday, SAS announced the beginning of a new era with its Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions OEM partnership. This is the first time SAS has provided its technology for an equipment manufacturer to wrap into its solution to help retail customers gain the benefits of advanced analytics. We always ask
I was privileged with the opportunity to present a couple of papers at SAS Global Forum 2015 in Dallas, Texas this year. While there, I was also excited to attend presentations with new and inventive approaches for working with the administration and architecture of SAS solutions. This is a collection
In my previous post I used junk drawers as an example of the downside of including more data in our analytics just in case it helps us discover more insights only to end up with more flotsam than findings. In this post I want to float some thoughts about a two-word concept