Shades of Pink - Honoring Breast Cancer Awareness Month was written by Celeste Cooper-Peel. Some things you never forget. I remember my mom’s breast cancer diagnosis like it was yesterday. She was only 42. Who would have thought? My mom found the lump herself and although it was cancer, she was
So, with the simple introduction in Understanding Hadoop security, configuring Kerberos with Hadoop alone looks relatively straightforward. Your Hadoop environment sits in isolation within a separate, independent Kerberos realm with its own Kerberos Key Distribution Center. End users can happily type commands as they log into a machine hosting the
Have you ever looked as a statistical graph that uses bright garish colors and thought, "Why in the world did that guy choose those awful colors?" Don't be "that guy"! Your choice of colors for a graph can make a huge difference in how well your visualization is perceived by
Would you build a house without a proper foundation? Most of us wouldn’t dare, but that’s exactly what many retail businesses are doing today. When building a house, if you don’t get the foundation right, paint, wallpaper and fixtures won’t matter much. It’s no different in the retail industry. Success
Last year, after 15 years of benefiting from the SAS community, I thought it was time to give a little something back. So I decided to write a paper on two technologies I have a healthy interest in: SAS and Hadoop. My paper SASReduce: an implementation of MapReduce using BASE/SAS
In a previous article I introduced the HEATMAPCONT subroutine in SAS/IML 13.1, which makes it easy to visualize matrices by using heat maps with continuous color ramps. This article introduces a companion subroutine. The HEATMAPDISC subroutine, which also requires SAS/IML 13.1, is designed to visualize matrices that have a small
A HighLow plot is very popular in the financial industry, often used to track the periodic movement of a stock or some instrument or commodity. The CandleStick Chart is one specific type of high low plot, purportedly originating in Japan for tracking of financial instruments in the rice trade. Creating a
If you live in an English speaking country you are used to a relatively unadorned alphabet. Take a look at the French and Spanish languages, where vowels are decorated with accents like “acción” in Spanish, and the circumflex, or the hat used in “pâte” in French. Look at the gorgeous
People often talk about the customer experience and the engagement model. This is an easier task when a business has regular interactions with its customers like banks and retailers. However, for insurers, this is a challenge. First of all, insurers have infrequent interactions with their customers. When there is interaction,
It’s a great time to be a sports fan – and an even better time to be a sports and data fan as these two worlds continue to meld together. For the last couple of years nearly every conversation about sports, analytics or both had to have at least one
A student brought in this coding problem after her manager was struggling with this issue for a while. They played guessing games, but to no avail. Here’s what happened when they submitted data step and proc sql code using a WHERE clause with an INPUT function? data aileen; length hcn
In last week's article about the distribution of letters in an English corpus, I presented research results by Peter Norvig who used Google's digitized library and tabulated the frequency of each letter. Norvig also tabulated the frequency of bigrams, which are pairs of letters that appear consecutively within a word.
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
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
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.
