Prime numbers are strange beasts. They exhibit properties of both randomness and regularity. Recently I watched an excellent nine-minute video on the Numberphile video blog that shows that if you write the natural numbers in a spiral pattern (called the Ulam spiral), then there are certain lines in the pattern
Users have often expressed the need for more marker symbols. ODS Graphics supports over 30 scalable marker symbols, both filled and empty. As mentioned in an earlier article, with SAS 9.4, filled markers can now have outlines and fills, and can also have special effects. Also with SAS 9.4, now you
This week's SAS tip is from Applied Data Mining for Forecasting Using SAS by Tim Rey, Arthur Kordon, and Chip Wells. Whether you're a forecasting practitioner, engineer, statistician, or economist, you'll appreciate the many real-world examples in the book. And hopefully this free excerpt. The following excerpt is from SAS Press
Performance management systems are becoming more important to local governments across the country. This is true for several reasons. Citizens are calling for a more accurate accounting of how their tax monies are being spent. Local government revenues have not been growing as much as in the past and, in
I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Marje Fecht was selected as the conference chair for SAS Global Forum 2014. This was April 2011, and I was at PURE Nightclub in Las Vegas. That's not my usual "clubbing" scene, but we were at the kickback party for
Even though I’ve worked as software technology marketer over the years, I have to admit that on a personal level I’ve probably related more to TV programming than software programming. When it comes to writing, I’ve always gravitated more toward crafting marketing communications than code. And when it comes to
With each release of SAS/IML software, the language provides simple ways to carry out tasks that previously required more effort. In 2010 I blogged about a SAS/IML module that appeared in my book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, which was written by using the SAS/IML 9.2. The blog post showed
In a previous post, I showed you how to send graphs with charttips & drilldowns in an email ... but what if you also need to send the graphs that you're drilling-down to? You guessed it - SAS also has a slick trick for doing that! When you create SAS graphs
In the movie, The Matrix: Reloaded, our heroes and the KeyMaker frantically navigated from world to world through a series of doors and locks trying to escape the villains. Fortunately for our heroes, the KeyMaker always had the right key on his ring, he just had to know what key
I’m usually not one for gadgets. I tend to like practical things that I will use often. However, when I started seeing different recipes around the internet using zucchini, butternut squash or sweet potato noodles, I was intrigued!
I began 2014 by compiling a list of 13 popular articles from my blog in 2013. Although this "People's Choice" list contains many articles that I am proud of, it did not include all of my favorites, so I decided to compile an "Editor's Choice" list. The blog posts on
Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Analysis (or RFM) is a popular customer segmentation technique employed by database marketers everywhere. Marketers use RFM to identify which customers are most likely to respond to a direct marketing campaign. The model takes into account three simple metrics: How recently did the customer buy from
A large variety of graphs fall in the category of what I call a "Single-Cell" graph. This type of graph consists of a single data region along with titles, footnotes, legends and other ancillary objects. Legends and text entries can be included in the data area. The data itself is displayed
SHA256 and other hash functions are supported in SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya. It's better than MD5 as a cryptographic hash!
Watching the news recently it occurred to me that many of the stories involved data in some way. Many of the reports from the recent Consumer Electronics Show showcased products to enable users to create and use ever-growing personal collections of data. Want data on how well you sleep? No
Starting with SAS 9.4, not only will SAS administrators see lots of processes running on your operating system supporting the various SAS servers (such as SAS Metadata server), you will also see two new processes that have a description of “agent” running. Agents are software processes responsible for tasks such
Late last month, while many of us were sipping eggnog and decking halls with boughs of holly, SAS released the 13.1 version of its analytical products. Readers of Maura Stokes' newsletter, SAS Statistics and Operations Research News (Nov 2013), have already been alerted to new features in products such as
Every day of the year is an official 'national day' for something - here's a SAS chart to help you find which bizarre 'national day' falls on your birthday! I recently read an article that lists weird and unconventional national days. It was very interesting, but I found the data
Vector languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R are powerful because they enable you to use high-level matrix operations (matrix multiplication, dot products, etc) rather than loops that perform scalar operations. In general, vectorized programs are more efficient (and therefore run faster) than programs that contain loops. For an example
When you create maps, you are typically plotting data for analytics -- but you can also use SAS to create 'pretty' maps for background decorations (for posters, slides, presentations, etc). This blog shows you a few examples... A few years ago I noticed that the CNN Situation Room had a decorative
Software performance is a complex topic. The answer to every question depends—depends on hardware, depends on operating system, architecture, time of day, number of users and so on. (Margaret Crevar gave us some insight into that complexity in her January 2013 post Improving performance: Understand the problem.) That’s why we
Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? Do you typically achieve them? Studies say that only about 40-50% of us make New Year’s Resolutions each year, and unfortunately very few of us actually succeed. Why is that? Were they unrealistic? Did we prepare to succeed? Were we ready to make a
Following Sanjay's cue (see “R U Graphing with SAS”), I tried creating data driven multi-cell graphs using R. I played with the lattice and ggplot2 packages. I found ggplot2 simpler to understand and use than lattice, but there are probably some trades offs. Data-driven layouts are referred to as 'faceting'
In 2013 I published 110 blog posts. Some of these articles were more popular than others, often because they were linked to from a SAS newsletter such as the SAS Statistics and Operations Research News. In no particular order, here are some of my most popular posts from 2013, organized
Sure, you have a great looking table and you produce it with PROC TABULATE. And then, bam! Your boss comes along and decides that since your output looks so good in Word, that he’d like that boilerplate paragraph inserted automatically. Currently, you produce the tables and then pass the RTF
Because I began my SAS career in the Publications division, I like to think that I have a keen eye when it comes to SAS documentation. When I first visited the SAS 9.4 online documentation, I immediately noticed that it had a different look. Examine the image below; can you
Recently a user new to GTL and SG procedures asked how to create a Bland-Altman graph on the SAS Communities site. He included an image of the resulting graph to indicate what he wanted, I described to him how that graph can be created, but since he is new to the art
Welcome to the SAS administrator blog series for 2014! Back in early 2013, the most popular posts on the SAS Users Groups blog were all about the roles and responsibilites of SAS administrators. I was reminded of them during a presentation at WUSS 2013 in Las Vegas. Carey Smoak of
In my previous post I described the new Polygon plot statement that is included with the SAS 9.4M1 release. So, a valid question is - what is my motivation for discussing the new features in SAS 9.4M1 when most users are at SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.2 versions? Here are a
In November, I resumed the “it’s all about the data” series, laying a foundation for helping SAS administrators understand how SAS stores and manages data for use in business intelligence and analytic applications. For this article, I culled our internal Thotwave knowledge base and queried our consultants who get questions
