Last year during Computer Science Education Week, some in the corporate community participated in The Hour of Code. To those who visited classrooms, thank you! Telling students about the exciting careers in computer science not only inspires leaders of tomorrow, but it also leads to more graduates equipped to innovate
I don’t know why I’m on this medical theme lately – maybe it’s because my parents are aging. They talk about bits falling off, take lots of naps and describe how body parts don’t work like they used to. They’ve gone to pre-packaged pills – dividing up their medications by
I recently saw an interesting infographic (see partial screen-capture below) about the top 10 most annoying airline seatmate behaviors. But the infographic was one of those *long* spread out ones, that you have to scroll forever to see the whole thing. I decided to try to create a more efficient SAS
In my previous post I explained that even if your organization does not have anyone with data steward as their official job title, data stewardship plays a crucial role in data governance and data quality. Let’s assume that this has inspired you to formally make data steward an official job title. How
In trying to offer better support to SAS users, many customers’ IT departments are looking to consolidate all their SAS desktop users onto a centralized Windows, UNIX or Linux server. This option is a very practical strategy, but implementing it satisfactorily requires a lot of assessment on how the SAS
What Kind of Holidays Do You Want? Do you like your holiday filled with lots of parties or do you prefer a quiet walk in the woods with a friend? Do you love bumping elbows with thousands of shoppers at the mall or relaxing at home with family? These are good
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, One year a fractal made thee! O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, A heat map can display thee! From Pascal's matrix we define! Reflect across, divide by nine. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Self-similar and so divine! Eventually I will run out of
Last time I suggested that there are some typical use cases for master data, and this week we will examine the desire for accessibility to a presumed “golden” record that represents “the single source of truth” for a specific entity. I put both of those terms in quotes because I
December is all about traditions. Some of mine include holiday shopping, baking (I really mean eating) Christmas cookies and putting together my annual list of most read blogs on the SAS Training Post. So as traditions go… here’s my list of the top 10 most read blogs in 2014. How
Congratulations if you’re one of the over 300 presenters whose proposals for content were accepted for SAS Global Forum 2015! Now that it’s time to start preparing papers, posters and presentations, I thought this would be a good opportunity to write about the Presenter Mentoring Program, an excellent service offered
Last week I discussed factors that threaten access to mental health care. However, better access to care doesn’t always mean better quality of care. Overworked mental health professionals and overcrowded ERs are forced to expend efforts and limited resources where they have the most impact. This forces compromises in care.
To perform a successful data conversion, you have to know a number of things. In this series, we have uncovered the following about our conversion: Scope of the conversion Infrastructure for the conversion Source of the conversion Target for the conversion Management for the conversion Testing and Quality Assurance for
There are many ways to multiply scalars, vectors, and matrices, but the Kronecker product (also called the direct product) is multiplication on steroids. The Kronecker product looks scary, but it is actually simple. The Kronecker product is merely a way to pack multiples of a matrix B into a block
A common scenario is where we have a table of multiple measures over time. Here we have a simple example of Frequency and Response by Day. The Response is a linear function of the Frequency, as shown in the table on the left below. The shape of the data is
I recently found some very interesting data - a numeric Corruption Perceptions Index for each country. And of course I just had to try and create my own SAS version... First, here's the original map on the transparency.org site. They mapped all the values using a yellow-orange-red gradient, the map
A colleague asked me a question regarding my recent post about the Pascal triangle matrix. While responding to his question, I discovered a program that I had written in 1999 that computed with a Pascal triangle matrix. Wow, I've been computing with Pascal's triangle for 15 years! I don't know
Here on the Data Roundtable we've discussed many topics such as root-cause analysis, continual improvement and defect prevention. Every organization must focus on these disciplines to create long-term value from data quality improvement instead of some fleeting benefit. Nowhere is this more important than the need for an appropriate education strategy, both in
In a recent post, I talked about the 5 essential characteristics of cloud computing. In today’s post, I will cover the three service models available in the cloud as they are defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. Like the story of Goldilocks, when it comes
As teachers across 35+ states are evaluated, and sometimes compensated, in part by the academic growth of their students, there may be an unintended consequence. Teachers may question whether to accept student teachers, in fear of the student teacher bringing down their value-added estimate(s) and overall evaluation rating. How can
A student in a SAS class recently asked if there were a way to eliminate data error notes from the SAS log and, instead, write them to a separate file. Of course there's a way! Here's a simple datastep. Notice the missing dollar sign to indicate the variable GENDER (M,
If you have SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS for Windows installed on a machine together, they should Just Work. There is no special setup required. But...what if they don't? I've posted an article in the SAS Enterprise Guide community about this topic. Read the article to learn: How to select
So much for a single version of the truth.
Last year, my SAS Simulation Studio R&D team began a discrete-event simulation modeling project of a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with two doctors from Duke University’s Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine. After several initial meetings discussing such things as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), patent ductus arteriosis (PDA), and
SAS University Edition has been available for free download for six months – in that time we’ve seen 50,192,670 PROCs or DATA steps executed globally – that’s almost 4,000 hours duration! Now, we were founded on stats so we thought we’d bring you some of the key metrics we’ve discovered over
There’s a lot of talk about modernizing hospitality marketing – and most of it is dependent on finally cracking the nut between online and offline guest data and bringing predictive analytics to play. But there is a fundamental problem hampering our ability to do this and it starts with how hospitality
Did you know??? The largest gingerbread man in the world is a dieter’s nightmare, weighing in at a whopping 466 pounds, six ounces. The Gingerbread House, in Rochester, Minnesota, baked the giant cookie on February 21, 2006. An average of 5,800 people end up in the ER after suffering injuries
Pascal's triangle is the name given to the triangular array of binomial coefficients. The nth row is the set of coefficients in the expansion of the binomial expression (1 + x)n. Complicated stuff, right? Well, yes and no. Pascal's triangle is known to many school children who have never heard of polynomials
SAS Support Communities provide a forum in which to engage and share with your fellow SAS experts, now in over 20 topic areas including Forecasting and Econometrics. This is the go-to website for your hard core modeling questions, such as "Holdouts in PROC ARIMA," "2-stage Heckman (1979) procedure," and the
As 2014 slowly winds down it’s time to gear up for the holiday shopping rush. As in recent years the Consumer Electronics Association reports tech gifts will again be high on everyone’s list this holiday shopping season. A new addition to the list this year are numerous Internet of Things
Just a reminder that on Wednesday, December 3, 10:00am ET, Paul Goodwin will be delivering the next Foresight/SAS Webinar on "Getting Real About Uncertainty." From the description: Many forecasts only tell us about things like probable events, expected sales and prospective demand. Often they tell us nothing about the level
