The 2013 SAS Global Forum is around the corner in San Francisco and the anticipation is building. Early indications are that attendee registration is up from last year, and we are looking forward to a great conference starting Sunday, April 28. It is great to see the large and diverse offering
I recently showed someone a trick to create a graph, and he was extremely pleased to learn it. The trick is well known to many SAS users, but I hope that this article will introduce it to even more SAS users. At issue is how to use the SGPLOT procedure
This week's SAS tip is from Phil Mason and his ever-helpful book In the Know...SAS Tips and Techniques From Around the Globe, Second Edition. When the book released in 2006, it received a lot of praise from the user community. This quote from SAS user Ron Fehd is a personal favorite: "Phil Mason, one of the SAS
I’ve attended many trade shows and conferences in my career, but there is nothing like a user conference. I feel that way because I’ve been working with SAS and DataFlux users for over eight years. Or maybe it’s because I helped plan the DataFlux users event again and again. Nonetheless,
If you're a SAS administrator and haven't registered or planned your agenda for SAS Global Forum 2013, here are a few key happenings to tempt you!
I often see variations of the following question posted on statistical discussion forums: I want to bin the X variable into a small number of values. For each bin, I want to draw the quartiles of the Y variable for that bin. Then I want to connect the corresponding quartile
I was driving back from Washington, DC this weekend after spending a couple of days admiring the cherry blossoms and taking my oldest son sightseeing. Wanting to grab something fast for lunch, we stopped at McDonald's a few miles outside the capital. I ordered Chicken McNuggets for my son and
In the SAS User Groups LinkedIn group, some generous "old timers" offer tips to the potentially shy newcomers for connecting with other SAS professionals at SAS Global Forum. Perhaps these folks remember their own introverted natures, and they want to encourage attendees to get the most out of their conference
The conference is less than a month away and I am excited to travel to SAS Global Forum. It seems like just yesterday when I accepted the responsibility of being the conference chair, I was full of ideas and aspirations for what I envisioned at this conference. Fortunately, all these
This year at SAS Global Forum, the theme is “Strength in Numbers” and SAS Education is offering a number of training and certification opportunities to strengthen your SAS knowledge. We hope that you will take advantage of this unique chance to take a class, get SAS certified and attend the
Well really, the gumption, you’re probably thinking—sharing tips with seasoned SAS Global Forum participants! I’m excited beyond measure, thrilled and a little nervous to be presenting in San Francisco. Yes, I know I’m a Global Forum first-timer, but with your permission, I’d like to offer some tips that I've found
Getting Started with SAS -- a free webinar for new SAS users -- is now available for on-demand viewing. During this SAS Talks session, Stacey Syphus and I review the basics of what SAS is, what people use it for, and what you can expect to see as a new
Welcome to Part 3 of the value-added Myth Busters blog series. I have heard a variation of this many times. “Why shouldn’t educators just use a simple gains approach or a pre- and post-test? They can trust simpler methodologies because they can replicate and understand them more easily.” Simple growth measures
I consider myself lucky to have confirmed first-hand that Nate Silver is a relatively smart guy. He most recently published a book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t, and he is particularly well known for accurately predicting the outcome of the 2012
Continuing with our stringed list theme, in this post I would like to talk about applying functions to those lists. So far we have developed quite a few tools that can manipulate lists in different ways, but what good are they if we can’t do something meaningful with the lists?
In this International Year of Statistics, I'd like to describe the major role of statistics in public health advances. In our modern society, it is sometimes difficult to recall the huge advances in health and medicine in the 20th century. To name a few: penicillin was discovered in 1928, risk
In the previous two articles we discussed Discrete Attribute Maps, and how these can be used to ensure that group attributes like color are consistently mapped to group values regardless of their position in the data. Now, let us take a look at the attributes map that allows you to
New research by the CMO Council and SAS, entitled "Big Data's Biggest Role: Aligning the CMO & CIO," shows more overlaps than differences between marketing and IT. Big data is uniting the CMO and CIO in their common quest for a customer-centric organization. 61 percent of marketers and 60 percent of
I haven't seen an official definition of 'infographic' that I really like ... but in my mind it's something 1/2 way between data visualization & artwork. It borrows elements from graphs & dashboards, and combines that with an artistic poster. If you perform a Google image search on infographic you'll see
As a SAS consultant, trainer and regular presenter at local user groups, I (think I'm) fairly comfortable presenting to SAS users, managers, stakeholders and others of varying numbers. Following on from Tricia Aanderud's Presentation Horror Storiesd I'm reminded why this is one of my favorite tips: Know your audience.
I have been on both sides of the table during an interview to hire a SAS administrator. I’ve been hired as a SAS administrator, and I have hired SAS administrators. Today, I work with SAS customers to help them find the best software for their business needs. I get asked-
Peppers, sweet or hot, are packed full of great nutrition and are extremely versatile ingredients. Bell peppers are a favorite pepper for many and appeal to a wide range of people because, while they still have a bite, they are much sweeter since they lack capsaicin (compound responsible for
A SAS customer asks: How do I use SAS to generate multiple samples of size N from a multivariate normal distribution? Suppose that you want to simulate k samples (each with N observations) from a multivariate normal distribution with a given mean vector and covariance matrix. Because all of the
A sugar packet at a local Chinese restaurant had this wisdom to share, “Experience is what you get, when you don’t get what you want.” With that profound thought in mind, I’m sharing some of my worse speaking experiences so you can make your SAS Global Forum presentation better.
ODS statements are global SAS statements. As such, you can put them anywhere in your SAS program. For maximum readability, many SAS programmers agree that most ODS statements should appear outside procedures in "open" SAS code. For example, most programmers agree that the following statements should appear outside of procedures:
Last week I wrote about how you can use the Discrete Attributes Map to ensure that group values with specific names are represented in the graph with specific colors or other visual attributes such as marker symbol or line pattern. This attributes map also supports a special keyword "OTHER" which can be used to
Online marketers all want the same thing - for our customers to get what they want, when they want it, and with the fewest clicks possible. We already know that satisfied customers usually return, and now they share their experiences so the stakes have never been higher to get it
There’s always plenty to learn at PharmaSUG, which is one reason it draws attendees not only from the US and Canada, but from countries such as Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico and the UK. Learning Highlights Technical Keynote Address: "CDISC Standards: Now and To Come" from Wayne
A few weeks ago I found myself in a room full of fellow transportation geeks (a term I use with great respect) at the annual American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Washington Briefing. One panel in particular really got the room buzzing with talk about the transportation
SAS software benefits from the high performance of solid state drives (SSD), whether it is in the form of flash memory cards or hard-drive form-factor SSDs. The following general points should be considered when planning SSD storage for SAS usage:
