Learning. Sharing knowledge. Catching up with colleagues. My favorite part of attending SAS Global Forum is connecting with other SAS users from around the globe. SAS Global Forum 2014 is run for SAS users, by SAS users and all of the content presented at the event is from users like
Once again I'll be at SAS Global Forum this year. The 2014 location is Washington, D. C., so I am looking forward to greeting many friends in the government and consulting sectors. I always enjoy talking with SAS customers about statistics, simulations, matrix computations, and the SAS/IML product, so here's
The SAS Global Forum 2014 is just around the corner starting Sunday, March 23 and I am eager to attend creative presentations from SAS users on ODS Graphics. Adoption of SG procedures, GTL and ODS Graphics Designer is growing among users and I see many promising papers. Papers by users: Something for Nothing!
After decades of trying to "manage" and "control" quality, manufacturers continue to struggle with consistently achieving quality excellence. To conquer the realities of today's marketplace and achieve quality excellence, manufacturers need to adopt an analytic approach to quality. The basic objective of manufacturers hasn't changed since the beginning - produce
For the third year now, I'll be hosting the SAS Tech Talk shows at SAS Global Forum. (Since I've been invited back I can assume that I'm more of an Ellen DeGeneres than a Seth MacFarlane.) These shows feature SAS technical experts (mostly from SAS R&D) who are prepared to
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and classrooms all over the US are decorated with shamrocks and the green top hats of the mythical leprechaun. According to legend, if you ever catch one, the leprechaun has the magical power to grant three wishes in exchange for its release (not to mention
The SAS/IML language has several functions for finding the unions, intersections, and differences between sets. In fact, two of my favorite utility functions are the UNIQUE function, which returns the unique elements in a matrix, and the SETDIF function, which returns the elements that are in one vector and not
Like every SAS procedure, PROC REPORT generates error messages that are specific to that procedure. Some of these errors are easier to understand and work around than others. In this blog post, I show six of the trickiest errors, explain what might be causing the error, and give advice for
Many geeky mathematical people celebrate "pi day" on March 14, because the date is written 3/14 in the US, which is evocative of the decimal representation of π = 3.14.... Most people are familiar with the decimal representation of π. The media occasionally reports on a new computational tour-de-force that
Got a smart phone? Just about everyone does these days. And that little rectangle of glorious technology is changing the way our attendees experience SAS Global Forum. Your smartphone helps you stay connected at the conference, but it’s also a great tool for having fun. This year, we’re challenging you
Did you know that this Friday is Pi Day? How are you planning to commemorate this special day? :) Next year's Pi Day might even be more special than usual, being that it will contain: March 14, 2015 - 9:26:53. And if you realize the coolness of that (3.141592653), you might be
Are you one of the users who upgrades to the latest version of SAS as soon as it comes out? Or are you like some and wait to upgrade until you’re jumping several versions? We’ve talked in previous posts about the benefits of moving to SAS 9.4, so today I’m
In my last post in the Ask the Statistician series, we heard statisticians at the Analytics 2013 conference discuss what types of statistical techniques they use to solve their business problems. Given that these concepts are technical in nature, I wanted to better understand some of their best practices for sharing
Shouldn’t you always "Enjoy the Taste of Eating Right?" Eating healthy, nutritious foods should never have to feel drab, plain, boring and tasteless. March is National Nutrition Month® and this year’s theme focuses on combining taste and nutrition to create healthy meals that not only taste good but are good
Last week I showed how to find parameters that maximize the integral of a certain probability density function (PDF). Because the function was a PDF, I could evaluate the integral by calling the CDF function in SAS. (Recall that the cumulative distribution function (CDF) is the integral of a PDF.)
With the increasing emphasis on responsiveness, resiliency, flexibility and agility, I suppose it was only a matter of time before the “agile” concept caught up with strategy itself. While I may have hinted at this idea four years ago in two of my earliest posts for the Value Alley, “Strategy
SAS Global Forum 2014 is only a couple of weeks away, and I wanted to highlight what conference leaders are doing for our campuses. This year’s renewed focus on content successfully allowed for academics and institutional research to be content areas. As such, these selections may be included as target
It is always important to continue to sell the value of analytics within your organization, especially to your leaders. Usually, these type of results are delivered via reports, dashboards, or emails. However did you know that analytics: Detects when expensive machinery like electrical submersible pumps (ESP) or oil platforms need maintenance before
We can watch games on TV, rent a movie from Redbox, and Google our favorite SAS procedures when we’ve forgotten how something works. There are a myriad of ways to get entertained or educated in a second-hand way. But, whether it’s being at the ballpark, in a theater, or at
On most Mondays I blog about a function, programming technique, or resource that is useful for programmers who are getting started with SAS software. Recently I learned that my colleagues in the SAS education division have been hard at work developing a series of short videos that explain basic tasks
The 2014 SAS Global Forum will be the launch pad I use to blast off for SAS exploration! Since being introduced to SAS software, I have been driven to continually evolve as a SAS programmer through the development of my abilities and the discovery of new techniques. Winning the SAS
Another year, another conference! This year I am really looking forward to attending SAS Global Forum 2014. I am, of course, looking forward to seeing familiar faces and making new acquaintances at the networking events. This year the session content is spectacular and I will be in as many sessions
SAS Global Forum starts for me in the fall of the prior year. This is when you submit your ideas for papers and then wait patiently for many months to learn if it was selected. I enjoy writing and presenting ideas, so here are my topics and what inspired them.
In the Breaking Bad TV series, Walter White has an impressive lab where he secretly makes the illegal drug methamphetamine (meth). Wouldn't it be cool to use SAS to show the locations of all the clandestine meth labs in the US?!? Let's do it!... In this blog, I show you
SAS programmers use the SAS/IML language for many different tasks. One important task is computing an integral. Another is optimizing functions, such as maximizing a likelihood function to find parameters that best fit a set of data. Last week I saw an interesting problem that combines these two important tasks.
Every year, conference organizers get this same request “I want to attend a SAS conference, but my travel funds are limited, what do you recommend?” This seems like a good opportunity to share some of the clever ways this year’s SAS conference leaders are helping you save on SAS Global
My teenage daughter is a self-appointed anglophile. She's a big fan of British movies and TV shows such as Doctor Who and Sherlock, and although she has not yet visited the UK (an injustice for which she blames her father), she considers the place to be her homeland. In an
For those of us in the United States, particularly those of us on the East Coast where SAS Global Forum 2014 will be held, it’s been a rough winter! Some mornings I wear so many layers that I feel like that Ralphie’s younger brother in the movie A Christmas Story--“I
A colleague sent me an interesting question: What is the best way to abort a SAS/IML program? For example, you might want to abort a program if the data is singular or does not contain a sufficient number of observations or variables. As a first attempt would be to try
Often we need to plot multiple response variables on Y axes by a common variable on X axis. When the response variables are very different in magnitudes or format, we prefer to plot the variables on separate Y (Left) and Y2 (Right) axes. Here is some sample data with three response
