Being an author can be a tough gig. Lots of writing, reviews, edits, cover approvals…the list goes on and on. But often the good times outweigh the tough times. And we’re so lucky that many of our authors have written more than one book for SAS Press. One such author
“How can we begin to make sense of the unstructured data, when we still don’t make the most of our structured data?” said the exasperated senior manager from a large retail firm. One of the great pleasures of my job is the relationship with students that continues after class has
Tried, tested and true -- I’m sure you already practice some, if not all, of these efficient techniques to save resources. I recently shared these 10 techniques with the Wisconsin Illinois SAS users group in Milwaukee. The conference ran smoothly under the incredibly able guidance of Dr. LeRoy Bessler. I’ll
Four authors. Four papers. One set of data. The month of August and the 2014 Call for Content are just around the corner, and this seems like a good time to share a little inspiration and innovation. The Foundations and Fundamentals paper section at SAS Global Forum 2013 featured a four-part
Every programming language has an IF-THEN statement that branches according to whether a Boolean expression is true or false. In SAS, the IF-THEN (or IF-THEN/ELSE) statement evaluates an expression and braches according to whether the expression is nonzero (true) or zero (false). The basic syntax is if numeric-expression then do-computation;
Conventional or Organic? That is the question. Research varies about whether organic foods are healthier than conventional foods. However, one of the biggest arguments for buying organic is in regards to pesticide exposure. Convincing evidence is revealing that the pesticides we eat, drink and inhale are stored in our bodies
If, like me, you have children who are old enough to vote, you may have noticed what I have noticed. They’re different. They seem permanently connected to their friends via social media, rarely watch the news or read a paper, and they have many transient interests that seem to follow
On the Web site for the book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I provide instructions on how to download the sample data sets and install them so that they can be used from within SAS/IML Studio. When I wrote the book I did not anticipate that SAS users might want
Inspired by the JMP blog - Statisticians: harbingers of doom?: Enjoy what's left of the International Year of Statistics -- while you still can.
In my last post, I introduced the hardware solutions (such as a virtual IP switch or IP load balancer) that enable client applications to access services regardless of whether they are running on a primary or a failover server in a grid-enabled environment configured with high availability. In this post,
As I wrote in my previous post, a SAS customer noticed that he was getting some duplicate values when he used the RAND function to generate a large number of random uniform values on the interval [0,1]. He wanted to know if this result indicates a bug in the RAND
When I work on SAS projects that create lots of files as results, it's often a requirement that those files be organized in a certain folder structure. The exact structure depends on the project, but here's an example: /results |__ html |__ images |__ xls |__ data Before you can
The path to innovation isn’t canned. It’s not formulaic. It involves taking calculated risks and (as much as I hate this cliché) out-of-the-box thinking. It involves creativity and the eagerness to explore ideas. Notice I didn’t say new ideas. Sometimes innovation is more about re-purposing or reworking old ideas into
I'm happy to announce the SAS Data Mining online community forum has a new look and feel! There’s lots of additional content and functionality too. The SAS Data Mining community on support.sas.com is a central communications hub for anyone interested in SAS Predictive Analytics and Data Mining topics. Community Manager Anna
Tossing dice is a simple and familiar process, yet it can illustrate deep and counterintuitive aspects of random numbers. For example, if you toss four identical six-sided dice, what is the probability that the faces are all distinct, as shown to the left? Many people would guess that the probability
This week's SAS tip is from Phil Holland and his book Saving Time and Money Using SAS. Besides being a popular author, Phil is a frequent speaker at conferences around the globe and an active participant in online communities. If you're on LinkedIn, look for him on SAS Professional Forum
Many SAS Enterprise Guide users practically live in the Query Builder. For those who understand their data tables, the Query Builder provides a tremendous amount of flexibility to pull and manipulate data. The Query Builder produces SQL programs behind the scenes, which translates well for database-centric work. Sometimes a complex
This question comes up often when we’re working with SAS customers to configure their underlying storage arrays: “When is solid-state storage appropriate for SAS applications?” Solid-state drives, or SSDs, are the latest and greatest thing in storage today because they boast extremely fast performance. In this post, I’ll outline how
The CLUSTER procedure in SAS/STAT software creates a dendrogram automatically. The black-and-white dendrogram is nice, but plain. A SAS customer wanted to know whether it is possible to add color to the dendrogram to emphasize certain clusters. For example, the plot at the left emphasizes a four-cluster scenario for clustering
Recently a user chimed in on the SAS Communities page, requesting a way to add some observation level annotation to a box plot. Wendy was delighted to see a graph created by the UNIVARIATE procedure called "Schematic Plot". In this graph, the box plot of the analysis variable is shown with
Every programmer may dread the thought of a colleague peeking over his or her shoulder, double-checking code, but SAS Global Forum paper winner David Scocca has offered his tips for making code reviews a painless process. His paper, Communicating Standards: A Code Review Experience, is a must-read. Here’s a peek
How do you count the number of unique rows in a matrix? The simplest algorithm is to sort the data and then iterate down the rows, comparing each row with the previous row. However, this algorithm has two shortcomings: it physically sorts the data (which means that the original locations
Engineers who implement process control can use analytics to think outside the of box. Better yet, they can use analytics to help solve the issues and risks associated with being inside the box or outside the box in the first place. Read on to learn what box I'm referring to
This week's SAS tip is from the new book Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide by Chris Holland and Jack Shostak. This comprehensive book will help anyone dealing with CDISC standards. Learn more about the book and the authors--plus get free content here. The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Chris Holland and
Not everyone agrees on a definition of "big data" -- but you'll probably agree that the amount of data available today is a lot bigger than in the past, eh?!? ... so let's just call it "Bigger Data"! :) And you might have noticed that some of your old tried-and-true
If you routinely import data from external sources, chances are you’ve learned the value in having a systematic import process. In this post, I will begin sharing my approach of using metadata tables to guide the importing of data.
In the first post in this series, Seeing the Light: How SMBs are Using Data and Insights to Get Ahead, I shared the motivations that prompted three SMBs (BGF Industries, Oberweis Dairy and Twiddy & Company) to replace spreadsheets and intuition with a more sophisticated, analytics-driven approach. But what factors
Based on my previous posts, we are almost done with the basics of SAS libraries and how the various clients can access them. Before we leave this topic and go onto third-party database engines, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about some best practices for making sure that
I am not a big fan of the macro language, and I try to avoid it when I write SAS/IML programs. I find that the programs with many macros are hard to read and debug. Furthermore, the SAS/IML language supports loops and indexing, so many macro constructs can be replaced
A Bar Line graph is commonly used in many domains. The SGPLOT procedure makes it easy to create bar line graphs where the user can customize it in many different ways. This post is prompted by a recent question on the communities page on creating such a graph, with one bar and
