The insurance industry is heading for a crisis. Depending on which report you read the insurance industry is facing a shortfall in job vacancy from anything from 40,000 to nearly half million in the next few years. Baby boomers in specialized jobs like underwriters and claims adjusters are retiring and insurers
As monsoon season begins, many Nepal earthquake victims have shelter over their heads thanks in part to an unlikely intersection of two SAS global development projects. The first project is with the International Organization for Migration (IOM). IOM is the first responder to any crisis that displaces people. IOM provides
I've seen some crazy process flows in SAS Enterprise Guide. Crazy-big, and crazy-complex, used by real customers to accomplish real work. But while these process flows represent a ton of work, this is usually a calculated investment to automate processes that would be difficult to capture in another way. For
I just spent much of the past week watching and trying to ride waves on the North Carolina coast. Small waves, mind you, nothing spectacular and certainly nothing that you would consider edgy or life-altering. Nothing that big wave surfers like Laird Hamilton, Garrett McNamara and others of their substance
We’ve all heard that dark leafy greens are good for us. Did you know that dark green leafy vegetables, calorie for calorie, are considered one of the most nutrient-dense foods available!
You've probably heard of a random walk, but have you heard about the drunkard's walk? I've previously written about how to simulate a one-dimensional random walk in SAS. In the random walk, you imagine a person who takes a series of steps where the step size and direction is a
This is my second blog on the topic of anonymization, which I’ve spent some time over the past several months researching. My first blog, Anonymization for data managers, focused on the technical process. Now let’s dive into the role for analysts, report designers and information owners. To analysts and reporting
This SAS author tip is from Robert Virgile, author of “SAS Macro Language Magic: Discovering Advanced Techniques”. It actually came about when a reader posted a comment on one of Virgile’s blogs. Thank you to that reader for their comment! Technically, %INCLUDE is not part of macro language. Yes, it
As you travel around the world, do you know where English, French, Spanish, and Arabic are spoken? This blog will help you quickly answer that question, with some cool SAS maps! But first, here's a picture of my friend Joy posing beside an interesting sign during one of her international
Yes. But since this post needs to be more than a one-word answer to its title, allow me to elaborate. Data governance (DG) enters into the discussion of all enterprise information initiatives. Whether or not DG should be the opening salvo of these discussions is akin to asking whether the
What does the future of analytics look like in your organizations enterprise architecture? Does it include thinking about a two speed approach to analytics which includes both: An agile rapidly changing analytics platform for innovation (a lab) seperated from operations and broad enterprise audience usage A slowly moving systematic enterprise analytics platform (a factory)
SAS/IML software is used by many SAS programmers, primarily for creating custom algorithms and macros that implement statistical analyses that are not built into any SAS procedure. I know that PROC IML is used regularly by pharmaceutical companies, by the financial and insurance industries, and by researchers in medical colleges
The SGPANEL procedure makes it easy to create graph panels that are classified by one or more classifiers. The "Panel" layout is the default and it places the classifier values in cell headers at the top of each cell. When using LAYOUT=Latice or RowLattice, the row headers are placed at
If your organization is large enough, it probably has multiple data-related initiatives going on at any given time. Perhaps a new data warehouse is planned, an ERP upgrade is imminent or a data quality project is underway. Whatever the initiative, it may raise questions around data governance – closely followed by discussions about the
I’ve spent some time over the past couple of months learning more about anonymization. This began with an interest in the technical methods used to protect sensitive personally-identifiable information in a SAS data warehouse and analytics platform we delivered for a customer. But I learned that anonymization has two rather different meanings; one in the
Update: This blog has been updated with the 2016 map. You can use SAS for just about anything - that includes finding a great fireworks show to watch during the US Independence Day holiday! Here's a fireworks-locator map I created using SAS (see technical details below). The red dots represent
Summertime has arrived! Here are some fun, serious and what some might think are absurd questions about water safety. Take the quiz and test your knowledge.
When you count the outcomes of an experiment, you do not always observe all of the possible outcomes. For example, if you roll a six-sided die 10 times, it might be that the "1" face does not appear in those 10 rolls. Obviously, this situation occurs more frequently with small
There is so much going on in our country right now socially, that I feel like someone has just placed a soapbox in front of me and dared me to climb up. Never one to resist, let's talk about parenting in shifting sands. Talking to your kids (of all ages) about
I’m not a big gambler, but there is something I would put my money on – analytics. Analytics is helping companies turn information into value. And yes, I mean money. If you want to learn about the latest analytics trends and get in on some of that “value” – attend
In recent years, we practitioners in the data management world have been pretty quick to conflate “data governance” with “data quality” and “metadata.” Many tools marketed under "data governance" have emerged – yet when you inspect their capabilities, you see that in many ways these tools largely encompass data validation and data standardization. Unfortunately, we
What is it that people like so much about motorcycles? The thrill/excitement/freedom of riding them, the 'biker image' portrayed in movies, or great songs such as Little Honda by the Hondells? I'm not a biker per say, but I do have a couple of motorcycles, and am a known associate
Word clouds have been available in SAS Visual Analytics for a while now, but recently, sentiment analysis was added to their functionality. For those of you not familiar with word clouds, a word cloud, also known as a tag cloud, is a visual representation of text data. You are probably
When I am computing with SAS/IML matrices and vectors, I often want to label the columns or rows so that I can better understand the data. The labels are called headers, and the COLNAME= and ROWNAME= options in the SAS/IML PRINT statement enable you to add headers for columns and
When ODS Graphics was first released with SAS 9.2 in 2008, a conscious effort was made to create graphs that were consistent and aesthetically pleasing out of the box. Features in the graph derive their visual attributes from the active Style. When Group classifications are in effect, the different classification
The school year may be over, but it’s not too late to renew your SAS Users Group registration for 2015. Or, if you have always wanted to start a new Users Group in your area or company, you still have time to register a new group and receive support this
Greece has been in the news lately, trying to secure funds to repay 1.5 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by the end of the month. And as luck would have it, there is some data available and some graphs to be created ... I love this job!
Nope - we're not digging up mummies in pyramids and analyzing the gender - this blog is about population pyramid charts and "digging into data"! But since the title might have lured in some pyramid fans, here's a picture of my friend Angela posing beside a pyramid - pretty cool, eh?!?
If you buying or selling a house. The relator will tell the value of the property is all about location, location, location. For insurance companies location is just as important. For an underwriter assessing the risk on a property is essential that they consider the location of the property. How
After doing some recent research with IDC®, I got to thinking again about the reasons that organizations of all sizes in all industries are so slow at adopting analytics as part of their ‘business as usual’ operations. While I have no hard statistics on who is and who isn’t adopting
