As consumers, the quality of our day is all too often governed by the outcome of computed events. My recent online shopping experience was a great example of how computed events can transpire to make (or break) a relaxing event. We had ordered grocery delivery with a new service provider. Our existing provider
A recent study by Bai & Anderson has found that some hospitals charge 10x (ie, 1000%) higher than the standard rates set by Medicare. Many news agencies have posted the list of the 50 US hospitals that have the highest markup. But I am more visually oriented, so of course I used SAS
If you have not yet discovered the new Ask the Expert series on the SAS Training site, you are missing out on a treasure. Visit the site right now and review all of the available topics, from "Newbie" to Analytics to Visualization to good ol' SAS programming. Go on; I'll
"Daddy, help! Help me! Come quick!" I heard my daughter's screams from the upstairs bathroom and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Was she hurt? Bleeding? Was the toilet overflowing? When I arrived in the doorway, she pointed at the wall and at the floor. The wall was
How is it that some companies can come up with a big idea and implement that idea successfully in the market, while others never get past the idea phase? "In the case of innovation," says Jill Dyché, VP of SAS Best Practices, "big ideas aren't enough." It's also not enough
Recently my wife and I took our annual anniversary trip – this time we went to the Grand Canyon, staying in Las Vegas. In researching our options to fly from Raleigh-Durham (RDU) to Las Vegas (LAS), we had several different selection criteria: what time we wanted to leave what time
For health and life sciences organizations, discussions about big data include gaining value from that data in the form of real-world evidence. Consider for a moment the amount of healthcare data that exists today thanks to the adoption of electronic health records. Then think about the future with data from
Summer temps are here and that’s fine by me! (I REALLY don’t like winter!!) And, now that it’s warm outside it’s time to catch up on fresh air, sunshine and balmy breezes. No more winter-imposed, nature deprivation! Playing hard in warm weather requires good fuel, powerful nutrition and, of course,
Equations that involve trigonometric functions can have infinitely many solutions. For example, the solution to the equation tan(θ)=1 is θ = π/4 + kπ, where k is any integer. In order to obtain a unique solution to the equation, we define the "arc" functions: inverse trigonometric functions that return a
Have you ever been bitten by a mosquito? What are the odds it carried the West Nile virus? ... Perhaps a lot higher than you thought! Here's a picture of a mosquito that kept 'bugging' me around my computer desk at home - good riddance, I say!
Bill Benjamin’s bestseller, Exchanging Data between SAS and Microsoft Excel: Tips and Techniques to Transfer and Manage Data More Efficiently, was pipped at the post as he narrowly missed the top spot to Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide, at last month’s PharmaSUG 2015 meeting in Orlando -- by one
Operations technology (OT), such as control systems, are crucial elements in our daily lives. They make the stoplights function at intersections. They guide robots with precise movements on the shop floor. Their switches and routers are the backbone of our internet. But what if they were even more intelligent? What
I believe most people become overwhelmed when considering the data that can be created during event processing. Number one, it is A LOT of data – and number two, the data needs real-time analysis. For the past few years, most of us have been analyzing data after we collected it,
The SGPLOT procedures includes features to add annotations to your graph in many different ways. Annotations provide you a flexible way to add features to your graph that are not available through the standard plot statements. Recently, I saw this graph on the web that caught my attention. Clearly, this looks like
When reading a text file (common extensions: TXT, DAT; or, for the adventurous: HTML) with the DATA STEP, you should always view several lines from the text file, and compare to the record layout, before completing the INPUT statement. There are many ways to view a text file. I use
I still remember the first time I was asked to "consult" on a statistical problem. A former physics professor had some students who had gathered data that should lie along an arc of a theoretical circle. The professor asked if there was a regression technique that could find the center
I am noticing a trend. At the ASSA meetings in January (where economics, sociology and finance academics and practitioners gather to discuss their research) I was surprised to see how much “machine learning” was trending with economists. The session “Machine Learning Methods in Economics and Econometrics,” with papers by Susan
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
My previous blog was about popular first names ... now for a blog about popular surnames (ie, last/family names)! But before we get started, here's a little pop-quiz - what country is my friend Mr. Foley's surname from?
In my last two posts, I introduced some opportunities that arise from integrating event stream processing (ESP) within the nodes of a distributed network. We considered one type of deployment that includes the emergent Internet of Things (IoT) model in which there are numerous end nodes that monitor a set of sensors,
Default PROC FREQ output looks like this: Suppose you don't want the two cumulative statistic columns above. No problem. Those can be suppressed with the NOCUM option on the TABLE statement, like this: proc freq data=sashelp.shoes; table product / nocum; run;
The Internet has been around a long time. "Things" have been around even longer. Put the things on the Internet, aka the Internet of Things (IoT), and you get so much hype that IoT is at the top of Gartner's "Peak of Inflated Expectations" – and poised for a fall into the "Trough of
If you have your SAS Certified Platform Administrator Credential, then it’s clear that you’ve studied a lot to achieve it. But suddenly the Hadoop era shows up and what you find are big gaps in your skills inventory. SAS administrators must be familiar with all the data SAS platform can
USA Today recently published an article titled 10 retailers take two-thirds of your money. The story highlights the revenue distribution among the Top 100 retailers in the S&P 1500. It was startling to see that such a small number of retail powerhouses take in such a large percentage of consumers’ income.
An important goal of SAS Environment Manager is to communicate with existing software systems. This capability includes not only monitoring other non-SAS platform resources, but also means having the ability to respond to events from outside the SAS platform. We’ve seen how SAS Environment Manager can generate an event for external consumption (see Scott McCauley’s
A couple of years ago, I blogged about the most popular baby names in the US over the past 100 years. This time, I focus on the most recent year, and take it to the state level! But before we get started, here's a picture of my friend Jennifer's daughter,
A couple weeks ago, I completed my third half ironman (a triathlon consisting of a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride, and 13.1 mile run), and WOW; it was a hard event! I had an awesome race back in October and had high expectations for this race – even
I was reading a statistics book when I encountered a histogram that caught my eye. The histogram looked similar to the one at the left. It contained a normal density estimate overlaid on a histogram, but the height of the density curve seemed too short when compared to the heights
There is a job category unfamiliar to most people that plays a crucial role in the creation of analytics software. Most can surmise that SAS hires software developers with backgrounds in statistics, econometrics, forecasting or operations research to create our analytical software; however, most do not realize there is another
SAS Cares. That’s how we want you to feel once you become a SAS customer. How do we do that? By bringing all of the support resources together with one goal in mind – helping you become a better SAS user. The SAS Cares experience involves everything from searching on
