There's been a lot of debate lately about whether it's good or bad for the local law enforcement agencies to receive military surplus items. The data has recently become available, but it is just a big long text list of almost a quarter million items (see below). Therefore I thought
We’ve all heard the tales about garlic protecting against evil and warding off vampires, but garlic is much more than an accessory to be worn around your neck at Halloween! Garlic provides numerous health benefits and is one of the most popular seasoning ingredients around. It goes well in almost
In a previous blog post I showed how to order a set of variables by a statistic. After reshaping data, you can create a graph that contains box plots for many variables. Ordering the variables by some statistic (mean, median, variance,...) helps to differentiate and distinguish the variables. You can
I’m sure, like me, you've been annoyed at being stuck in a traffic jam in a city centre somewhere, or been frustrated at your kids leaving lights on, or annoyed with the heating coming on when the weather’s warmed up and you've not got round to adjusting the thermostat. Now,
Capital investment in production capability is the weakest link in the business value chain. It always has been and likely always will be. It’s the driving force behind the tendency towards cartels, collusion and monopolies. While it can make the first entrant into a brand new market, in the long
This guest post was written by Owen P. Hall, Jr., Professor of Decision Sciences at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. He has more than 35 years of academic and industry experience in mobile learning technologies and business analytics. He also holds the Julian Virtue Professorship and is
Imagine you are the race director for a Formula One car. Decisions must be made within seconds, sometimes in the blink of an eye. When speed is of utmost importance, it is necessary for race engineers to have all relevant race data at their fingertips. Instead of having a couple of
When I create a graph of data that contains a categorical variable, I rarely want to display the categories in alphabetical order. For example, the box plot to the left is a plot of 10 standardized variables where the variables are ordered by their median value. The ordering makes it
Okay, let's say your data is in Hadoop. The distributed, open source framework is configured as it should be across low-cost servers and your data is sitting in those clusters. It's been a meaningful effort to get to this point but how does it benefit your organization? If it's not doing something
And now for the five steps: 1. Ignore industry benchmarks, past performance, arbitrary objectives, and what management "needs" your accuracy to be. Published benchmarks of industry forecasting performance are not relevant. See this prior post The perils of forecasting benchmarks for explanation. Previous forecasting performance may be interesting to know, but
“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” ~Dale Carnegie It seems like these days, as Americans rush around from task to task, with a “to do”
It is after Labor Day in the US, meaning we must no longer wear white shoes, skirts, jackets, or trousers. But even if you are now going sans-culotte, it is time to begin thinking about organizational performance objectives for 2015. Setting forecasting performance objectives is one way for management to shine...or
The major benefit of 64-bit applications is that they no longer have the memory limitation imposed by their 32-bit predecessors. This is why many SAS customers are making the transition from 32-bit SAS to 64-bit SAS. The move to 64-bit SAS can be daunting at first sight. There are many
I wanted to pass along this reminder from Pam Stroud at the International Institute of Forecasters: Grant to Promote Research on Forecasting For the twelfth year, the IIF, in collaboration with SAS®, is proud to announce financial support for research on how to improve forecasting methods and business forecasting practice.
Today is my fourth blog-iversary: the anniversary of my first blog post in 2010. To celebrate, I am going to write a series of fun posts based on The Code Book by Simon Singh, a fascinating account of the history of cryptography from ancient times until the present. While reading
Admit it - you were fascinated by the 3D pipes screensaver! How many CPU cycles did we let our machines burn up, drawing and re-drawing those silly pipes!?! What was your personal favorite CPU-hungry screensaver? (let us know in a comment!) Well, speaking of pipes, the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline
Writing my previous post about digital banks got me thinking about the widespread use of analytics. In his book Digital Bank, Chris Skinner states that data should be seen as the most critical asset for digital banks. Actually, this holds true for almost every company nowadays. If you don’t have data of
With the growing popularity and availability of online reviews and ratings, consumers have more information than ever before when purchasing a hotel stay. In order to build effective pricing and positioning strategies, hotel managers need to understand how consumers are using all of this user generated content with price to
While I was working on my recent blog post about two-dimensional binning, a colleague asked whether I would be discussing "the new hexagonal binning method that was added to the SURVEYREG procedure in SAS/STAT 13.2." I was intrigued: I was not aware that hexagonal binning had been added to a
At the KDD conference this week I heard a great invited presentation called How to Create a $1 billion Model in 20 days: Predictive Modeling in the Real World – A Sprint Case Study. It was presented by Tracey de Poalo from Sprint and former Kaggle President and well known
The ODS ExcelXP tagset has served us well over the years. It provides a reliable method to get formatted SAS output into Microsoft Excel workbooks, where the business world seems to like to live. And it's available in Base SAS, which means that you don't need SAS/ACCESS to PC Files
➤ 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
For far too long we have been using the venerable Scatter Plot to do the work of placing text strings in the graph. For far too long we have used the Scatter Plot or the Block Plot to place axis aligned text in the graphs. It is time to
In the first Star Wars movie, Obi-wan uses Jedi mind tricks to convince the stormtroopers that the droids they see are not the droids they're looking for. A colleague at SAS passed along a question from a SAS user where the column labels they were seeing were NOT the labels
Being that today is a Throwback Thursday, I decided to re-create one of my favorite events from elementary school -- show-and-tell! And of course I'll be showing and telling you about a graph ... using school data! OK - that SAS graph (above) is definitely "Throwback" but it's not the one
A while back The Wall Street Journal published the article “Corporate Economists Are Hot Again“ that chronicles the resurgence of in-house economists in corporate America. The role of a corporate economist may bring about visuals of classic economist stereotypes (watch Ben Stein play to this stereotype as a teacher in
In the last edition of the European elections, the main question was not only “Who is going to win the elections?” but also “What is going to be the turnout?” As it has taken a month and half to establish the real figure (the previous figure was based on exit polls so
It’s back to school time which brings a flurry of emotions – sadness that the precious days of summer are over, joy that order and routine may be restored to your household and relief that you don’t have to figure out where your kids will be next week and beyond.
Last Monday I discussed how to choose the bin width and location for a histogram in SAS. The height of each histogram bar shows the number of observations in each bin. Although my recent article didn't mention it, you can also use the IML procedure to count the number of
When the recent earthquake hit California, one of my friends commented that "California is so dry right now, I'm surprised it didn't just break off and fall into the ocean!" It got me wondering, just how bad and widespread is California's drought? I did a few Web searches and found lots
