Well, if I were asked to name the most intriguing spot in the SAS Support and Demo Area, it would probably be The Catalyst Café sponsored by SAS R&D. This exciting new area at SAS Global Forum 2014 is aptly name: a informal meeting place dedicated to jump-starting ideas for
Today is American Diabetes Association Alert Day®: a one-day "wake-up call" to bring attention to the increasing prevalence of diabetes worldwide. Whether or not you have diabetes, today is a perfect time to step back and think about your current lifestyle and what you can do NOW to prevent or
In December, Kathy Council gave us the scoop on the consolidation of several divisions at SAS into a single organization focused on customer support. At this morning’s 2014 Technology Connection, Fritz Lehman, Vice President of SAS Customer Engagement and Support, shared his vision by responding to some of your requests
SAS/IML 13.1 shipped a few months ago. I was asked to produce a video that highlights some of the new features in SAS/IML 13.1. In this video I describe several changes to the language before introducing the new built-in subroutines that create ODS statistical graphs. If your browser does not
In my region of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) one of the most anticipated times of the year has arrived— the NCAA basketball tournament. This is a great time of year for me, because I get to combine several of my passions. For those who don’t live among crazed college
With all the recent news reports about the missing Flight 370, I wondered what other airplanes have disappeared without a trace ... and I used SAS to visualize that data! There was in interesting infographic on the Bloomberg website that sort of answered my question, but their map just had
Are retailers suffering a skills shortage when it comes to analytics? Nikki Baird from Retail Systems Research (RSR Group) offers some intriguing observations about the critical analytical talent shortage facing the retail industry in a recent article, “Where Have All the Data Scientists Gone? SAS Analyst Day Report Out.” Her observations
Yesterday, I was on a phone call with a disappointed SAS user who won't be attending SAS Global Forum 2014. Like many others, her organization is facing another year of reduced travel and conference budgets. While there's no substitute for attending in person, live webcasts from SAS Global Forum make
SAS administrators have a delicate balance to maintain. SAS users want to be happy and productive, and to be granted the freedom to use any techniques in their skill set to accomplish their work. But the Business (or Government or Research institution) wants their sensitive data to be protected, and
Last month I blogged about defining SAS/IML functions that have default parameter values. This language feature, which was introduced in SAS/IML 12.1, enables you to skip arguments when you call a user-defined function. The same technique enables you to define optional parameters. Inside the function, you can determine whether the
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
