As you can tell from my recent posts (see here and here), I've been working with SAS and Microsoft Excel files quite a bit. I'm really enjoying the ability to import an XLSX file in my 64-bit SAS for Windows without any additional setup. After one long afternoon of back-and-forth
The first time I used the Internet it blew my mind. As a diplomat brat, at any point in time everyone I knew was everywhere but where I was. Thanks the miracles of Gopher, Veronica, IRC and email, the tyranny of distance didn’t seem so oppressive any more. When I
A challenge for you – do a Google search for “Hadoop Security” and see what types of results you get. You’ll find a number of vendor-specific pages talking about a range of projects and products attempting to address the issue of Hadoop security. What you’ll soon learn is that security
Do you crave sugar? For me, the answer is "Yes"! I was born with a sweet tooth. I call it "The Beast". What I have learned about The Beast over the years is the more sugar I feed it, the more it wants. I used to think, "Hmm, that’s interesting.
While at JSM 2014 in Boston, a statistician asked me whether it was possible to create a "customized bin plot" in SAS. When I asked for more information, she told me that she has a large data set. She wants to visualize the data, but a scatter plot is not
The rumors, flying for many moons now, have turned out to be true. Followed by U2's new album release, Apple announced the launch of the Apple Watch for early 2015. Apple has finally unveiled its first foray into wearable technology. The Apple Watch (yep, not the iWatch), is an Apple
If you're a SAS user, chances are you're a bit of a science/technology/engineering/math nerd -- and also a fan of The Big Bang Theory. Therefore this SAS analysis on The Big Bang Theory should be right up your alley! Yesterday (September 22) was the start of the 8th season for the TV series,
Let's get one thing straight: I'm no wuss. Well, at least *I* don't think so. But on September 3-5, 2014, I gladly joined ranks with over 400 WUSSes descending on the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose for the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) Educational Forum and Conference. It
To thousands of end users around the world, SAS® Enterprise Guide is a productivity tool for data management, analytics, reporting and SAS programming. As many features as SAS Enterprise Guide offers, these still represent just a fraction of what people can do with SAS. That's why a growing number of
This guest post was written by Dr. Jay Liebowitz, DiSanto Visiting Chair in Applied Business and Finance at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. He is also the author of several books including, “Big Data and Business Analytics,” Business Analytics: An Introduction,” and “Bursting the Big Data Bubble.” Next month,
We live in a world of acronyms, or rather TLAs, and SAS user group names are renowned for them. Last week I received a comment about one of the Australian user group names, and it got me thinking how did these names come about? What is their history? and to share
The skewness of a distribution indicates whether a distribution is symmetric or not. A distribution that is symmetric about its mean has zero skewness. In contrast, if the right tail of a unimodal distribution has more mass than the left tail, then the distribution is said to be "right skewed"
Many users of SGPLOT and GTL know how to mix and match various plot statements to create graphs, sometimes in ways not originally intended. You are also aware that you can go a step beyond, and use these systems to create completely non-standard graphs such as the Spiral Plot, the Polar
I recently wrote about my foray into the experimental world of ODS EXCEL. Using this new destination in SAS 9.4, I was able to create multisheet workbooks -- containing reports and graphs -- in the XLSX format. I outlined some of the benefits -- such as being part of Base
Several weeks ago, I led a SAS Talks webinar on SAS/ETS emphasizing the many recent changes to the software. SAS/ETS, for those unfamiliar with the product, is SAS’s suite of econometrics, time series and forecasting tools and algorithms. While we covered a substantial amount of material in the talk, there
Light years from Earth, within the constellation Virgo, two galaxies crashed into one another. Not something you could’ve seen peering into the night sky with the naked eye. We know it happened because astronomers pieced together images from several powerful telescopes to create what CBS News called a “cosmic magnifying
It's time for another blog post about ciphers. As I indicated in my previous blog post about substitution ciphers, the classical substitution cipher is no longer used to encrypt ultra-secret messages because the enciphered text is prone to a type of statistical attack known as frequency analysis. At the root
Did you know that different states charge different $$ rates for electricity? The graphs in this blog will let you easily compare your rate to the rates in other states ... Did you have a portable radio (aka "boombox") back in the 1980s? Do you remember how much it cost
In the morning at 6am my iPhone buzzes. But it is not the alarm clock, rather it's important information from an app. What is this, I think to myself and look sleepily at the screen: "Danger of black ice! Already 15 km traffic jam on the A3 towards Cologne!
By Cathy Enz, PhD., Lewis G. Schaeneman, Jr. Professor of Innovation & Dynamic Management, Cornell School of Hotel Administration. It seems that everyone loves to talk about innovation these days, but sadly the overuse of the word to describe minor tweaks and ordinary activities has turned it into a confusing
Scalability is the key objective of high-performance software solutions. “Scaling out” is a concept which is accomplished by throwing more server machines at a solution so that multiple processes can run in dedicated environments concurrently. This blog post will briefly touch on several scalability concepts that affect SAS.
Today, I'd like to introduce Celeste Cooper-Peel, the RFC's Wellness Supervisor. Celeste has been in the health and wellness field for twenty years. After receiving her Masters in Health Education from East Carolina University, she ventured into the mind/body world receiving training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Yoga. Shortly after,
Many people know that the SAS/IML language enables you to read data from and write results to multiple SAS data sets. When you open a new data set, it is a good programming practice to close the previous data set. But did you know that you can have two data
Data-driven marketing is all about how marketers can harness data and analytics to create a more customer-centric, fact-based approach to customer engagement. This, combined with quality execution leads to better customer experiences and improved customer equity. However when looking at customer-brand interactions in silos such as in the call centre
Imagine this situation: You go to you doctor and tell her that "something hurts in the lower chest area." Now, based on this short description of your pain, you expect her to come up with a precise diagnosis and a specific therapy suggestion, including treatment time and associated cost. Sound
It’s my favorite time of the year, draft time! NFL and Fantasy Football fans, I don’t mean THAT draft, but similar. It’s what I will call the #SASGF15 draft! The time of year when the best and the brightest, the most knowledgeable, passionate, and inspirational SAS users submit ideas around
I received the following email from a SAS/IML programmer: I am getting an error in a PROC IML module that I wrote. The SAS Log says NOTE: Paused in module NAME When I submit other commands, PROC IML doesn't seem to understand them. How can I continue the program? The
The Third PharmaSUG-China conference was held in Beijing last week, and I had the pleasure to attend this excellent conference along with a record number of attendees. On Thursday, I presented two 1/2 day seminars on ODS Graphics. One titled "Advanced Topics in GTL" and another titled "Complex Clinical Graphs
➤ 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
Often we need to plot the response values for binary cases of a classifier. The graph below is created to simulate one seen at http://www.people.vcu.edu/ web site of the shock index for subjects with or without a pulmonary embolism. In this case, the data is simulated for illustration purposes only. There
