The National Academy of Engineering identified fourteen "Grand Challenges for Engineering" that must be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable, economically robust, and politically stable future. (see the full list here) The challenges are a call-to-action for solutions to some of the most pressing issues in the 21st century:
Yesterday I read a Christina's blog article on the winners of the Best Presentations honor at MWSUG 2013. Two papers caught my (graphical) eye, both by Perry Watts. Perry has done a marvelous job describing how creatively use GTL to make graphs that may not be obvious at first glance.
If you know what this means, you’ll love our news! SAS Global Forum 2013 was the official “Year of the Poster”, and conference chair Rick Mitchell and his team more than tripled the number of poster submissions. Posters are indispensable for visual content. Poster presentations are also a huge asset
Should you ever guess on the SAT® or PSAT standardized tests? My son is getting ready to take the preliminary SAT (PSAT), which is a practice test for the SAT. A teacher gave his class this advice regarding guessing: For a multiple-choice questions, if you can eliminate one or two
My aunt Susanne is an elderly lady, who lives at the countryside and looks forward to celebrating her 80th birthday soon. Since the 1960's she has had a telephone connection with her fixed line provider. At that time, and for many years later, in the country where my aunt lives,
This week's SAS tip is from Michael Tuchman and his innovative book PROC DOCUMENT by Example Using SAS. Michael's book fills an important gap. For instance, in her review of the book, SAS user and senior statistical analyst Wendi Wright said: "Currently, I believe PROC DOCUMENT is a highly underused procedure and after reading
Want to know the secrets to landing a job as an analytics professional? I went straight to the source – the expert speakers of Analytics 2013 to find out. Here’s some of their advice… What advice would you give students considering a job in analytics and those already in the
Congratulations to Best Paper Winners from MidWest SAS Users Group conference! You'll want to read these, and check the MWSUG 2013 proceedings for other useful papers from the recent conference. Start planning now for MWSUG 2014 in Chicago.
In my last blog post I described how to implement a "runs test" in the SAS/IML language. The runs test determines whether a sequence of two values (for example, heads and tails) is likely to have been generated by random chance. This article describes two applications of the runs test.
I first spoke with Jill Dyché in March about her "Big data in big companies" research with Tom Davenport. They had interviewed a handful of organizations, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and UnitedHealthcare. They ended up speaking with executives from more than 20 companies about their big data
Recently I delivered a SAS Talks session: SAS 9.4: What’s New for SAS® Administrators . We had a large group attend and subsequently had a wonderful flood of questions that we couldn’t always keep up with. So I wanted to follow up with some of the popular questions:
The herbs and spices we use to flavor our foods can have powerful health benefits. Along with cinnamon and ginger, one of the most potent spices we have in our kitchen is turmeric. Turmeric is a bright yellow spice commonly found in curry powder (typically a mixture of coriander, cumin, fennel, mustard
While walking in the woods, a statistician named Goldilocks wanders into a cottage and discovers three bears. The bears, being hungry, threaten to eat the young lady, but Goldilocks begs them to give her a chance to win her freedom. The bears agree. While Mama Bear and Papa Bear block
Traditionally, SAS users like their processes to behave like Ron Popeil's famous rotisserie: they want to set it and forget it. That's the definition of a batch process. You work like heck to get it ready to run, then you push the button (or schedule it) and walk away. But
This year, SAS users are flocking to the Western Users of SAS Software’s (WUSS) annual conference. I had a chance to catch up with Operations Chair MaryAnne DePesquo, and she shared her excitement about this year’s conference. This is the first year that WUSS will be hosted in Las Vegas
Following SAS' Sanjay Matange's lead, I have recently set up a graphical (thumbnail-driven) index to my SAS/GRAPH blogs. Hopefully this will provide an easy way for you to quickly peruse my past blogs, and find the ones you might be interested in. So far, I've got 44 of my blogs
Energetic. Content Rich. Powerful. That's how I describe the upcoming conference. We have a great presentation lineup and new opportunities for you to take advantage of. Register now and reserve your seat today! Here are a few of our confirmed speakers: A two-time winner of the USA Memory Championship, Nelson
What is the best way to share SAS/IML functions with your colleagues? Give them the source code? Create a function library that they can use? This article describes three techniques that make your SAS/IML functions accessible to others. As background, remember that you can define new functions and subroutines in
So far in our "Ask the statistician" blog and video series, we have heard responses from statisticians to the following questions: Why is it important to celebrate the International Year of Statistics? How did you became interested in statistics? Why should students study statistics? How do you use statistics? What
Leading up to the Analytics 2013 conference, we’re going to dive into some of the big topics in the industry. Up first, the hurdles to using analytics and big data effectively in your organization. We reached out to some of our conference speakers and sponsors to get their take on
San Antonio plays host to this year’s South Central SAS Users Group (SCSUG) Educational Forum. Instead of the usual Sunday to Tuesday schedule, this year’s forum is being held on a Thursday (Oct. 31) and Friday (Nov. 1). But don’t worry – Halloween costumes aren’t being encouraged – the focus
"It slices, it dices ... it helps test laboratory mices!" In a joking way, this is a perfect description of SAS software, don't you think!?! :) And to prove it, this blog contains a collection of 32 examples, showing a variety of ways SAS can be used to graph data
Do your SAS programs read extra-large volumes of data? Do they run multiple DATA steps and procedures one after the other for hours at a time? Two papers from MWSUG 2013 show how you can speed up those long-running SAS jobs. Although their approaches and environments differed, both authors made
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage today. Some people see free online courses as a convenient way to introduce statistical concepts to tens of thousands of students who would not otherwise have an opportunity to learn about data analysis. Whereas 2013 is the International Year of Statistics,
Some of you may have already noticed the small graphical icon on the lower right side of the blog article labeled "Graphically Speaking Index". Yes, it is a link to a visual index for all articles published in this blog. Well, eventually it will have all the articles. So far, I
Has this ever happened to you? You have a SAS program with statements that you wrote, then you make use of a macro function or %include file supplied by a helpful colleague, and when your SAS code resumes, you find that all of your SAS titles have been changed out
“Please Mr CEO, sir, can you find just a few brief moments in your busy schedule for a group of us humble and undeserving employees to discuss our strategic initiative to totally transform the company?” No matter what the topic or function, the one consistent element of every successful significant
Last week I described how to generate permutations in SAS. A related concept is the "combination." In probability and statistics, a combination is a subset of k items chosen from a set that contains N items. Order does not matter, so although the ordered triplets (B, A, C) and (C,
This week's SAS tip is from Barry de Ville and Padraic Neville's new book Decision Trees for Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner. Filled with a multitude of examples and figures, this comprehensive book has received strong early user reviews. I hope that you'll also find this week's excerpt helpful in your
Some recent press articles question the value of big data while a book takes the opposite approach; I’ll choose the middle way. The New York Times article ‘Is Big Data an Economic Big Dud?’ questions the value of digital data and the resulting increase in the amount of data. This
