Good Old Country-Style Optimization In an odd way, Imre Polik's recent post, How to solve puzzles? Peg solitaire with optimization, reminded me of one more reason why I like to eat at Cracker Barrel, an American chain of country-style restaurants.
If you have programmed with SAS in the last 15 years, you have probably had a reason to share your SAS results in PDF format. The ODS PDF destination, much like a well-designed car, has evolved over the years, offering progressively nicer features like security, enhanced image formatting and embedded
It’s mid-afternoon. You just ate lunch. You were up early with the kids and had 4 back to back meetings today and now you need to mark off a few more items on your “To Do” list before the end of the day, but when you sit down, you’re suddenly
The XLSX libname engine in SAS allows you to read and write Microsoft Excel files in the same way that you can work with other data sets and databases. This article describes the basic (and some limitations) of the XLSX engine.
(Otherwise known as Truncate – Load – Analyze – Repeat!) After you’ve prepared data for analysis and then analyzed it, how do you complete this process again? And again? And again? Most analytical applications are created to truncate the prior data, load new data for analysis, analyze it and repeat
This SAS tip is from Robert Virgile and his book “SAS Macro Language Magic: Discovering Advanced Techniques”. We hope you find this tip useful. You can also read an excerpt from Virgile’s book. When CALL SYMPUT creates a new macro variable, it places that variable in “the closest non-empty symbol
Event stream processing (ESP) and real-time processing (RTP) so often come up in the same conversation that it begs the question if they are one and the same. The short answer is yes and/or no. But since I don’t need the other kind of ESP to know that you won’t
The Two-Bin Inventory Control System So what is a two-bin inventory control system? Whether you realize it or not, you are probably very familiar with the concept. In fact, if you are reading this on a tablet or smartphone, you may be sitting next to one right now (see photo). According to
When I was an undergraduate physic major, my favorite professor would start each class with a joke or pun. One day he began class with a paraphrase of a famous quote from the movie Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales). "Today," my professor said, imitating
As discussed in the last BFD post, sometimes a difficult and expensive problem doesn't have to be solved -- it can simply be avoided. When the teetering boulder threatened the baby below the cliff, we removed the baby and no longer had to worry about propping up the boulder. When it
Mount St. Helens volcano here in the US had a big eruption 35 years ago this week! Do you know exactly where it is located? Perhaps this SAS map can help... As you might have guessed, I'm a big fan of the awesome power of nature (hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, earthquakes, and
You are going to be spending proportionately more of your IT budget on security than you have previously spent or ever wanted to spend. Why? Because you and everyone else on this planet is engaged in the still early stages of an escalating information arms race, that, while you didn’t
In 1988 President Ronald Reagan proclaimed May as National Foster Care Month as a way to recognize foster parents for opening their homes to and caring for children in need. This annual celebration has grown to generate awareness of foster care and a recognition of all involved. The children, foster
What sends a data management product to the top of the “hot” list? In a word – speed. Especially when that speed can gracefully accommodate the huge world of streaming data from the Internet of Things. One of SAS’ hottest (and recently enhanced) products, SAS Event Stream Processing is an
It seems like everyone is searching for ‘best practice’ these days. We are constantly looking to learn from what is being held up as good, leading and perhaps even the best itself. While this is a valid exercise, I believe we are missing an opportunity to take a closer look
Last night over 640 SAS users from 12 countries met in Orlando for a great opening session at PharmaSUG 2015. Elizabeth Dennis from EMB Statistical Solutions and Syamala Schoemperlen from Alcon, a Novartis Company are this year’s co-chairs. They lined up a wonderful venue as well as content for the
According to Time Magazine, the next Ebola outbreak will cost the World Bank in excess of $30 billion dollars. In 2014, America spent in excess of $1.16 million dollars to treat two victims of the dreaded disease. While Ebola and other microorganisms of the deadly variety are scary creatures there
Dataset too big for PROC PRINT? One weird trick solves your problem! proc print data=bigdata (obs=10); run; The OBS= dataset option specifies the last observation to process from an input dataset. In the above example, regardless of dataset size, only the first 10 observations are printed; an easy way to
North Carolina is a state that requires yearly inspections of motor vehicles. An inspection checks for safety features (lights, brakes, tires,....) as well as checking vehicle emissions to ensure that vehicles meet air pollution standards. I recently had a car inspected and noticed a pie chart on the inspection's summary
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
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
