They say "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery"... Therefore when I imitate Hans Rosling's famous world-data animation, it's not that I'm jealous, but that I'm paying homage to him! (OK, and maybe also a little bit jealous! LOL) Well, anyway, for those of you who haven't seen it,
Reading Jan Bigalke’s SAS Global Forum paper on “Hardening a SAS® Installation on a multi tier installation on Linux" reminded me of baking apple stack cake with my mother. Neither is a simple project. Both are time-consuming, and their success depends on how skillfully you handle each layer. Data security
The power of a statistical test measures the test's ability to detect a specific alternate hypothesis. For example, educational researchers might want to compare the mean scores of boys and girls on a standardized test. They plan to use the well-known two-sample t test. The null hypothesis is that the
If you write a blog, you deal with spam comments. That's just part of the deal. Spammers are forever inventing new and creative methods for "tricking" you into accepting their spam comments. These comments have nothing to do with your blog topic but do contain trackback links to their own
Has anyone noticed that the REG procedure in SAS/STAT 12.1 produces heat maps instead of scatter plots for fit plots and residual plots when the regression involves more than 5,000 observations? I wasn't aware of the change until a colleague informed me, although the change is discussed in the "Details"
At SAS, one of our core values is to be swift and agile. So it makes sense that our software development be Agile too. The Agile methodology has been around for more than 10 years and was designed with software development in mind. Today, it is still used predominately for
In my article "Simulation in SAS: The slow way or the BY way," I showed how to use BY-group processing rather than a macro loop in order to efficiently analyze simulated data with SAS. In the example, I analyzed the simulated data by using PROC MEANS, and I use the
Often we want to visualize the relationship between variables over time. The understanding of such data can be improved by viewing the animated graph over time. With SAS 9.4, you can create animated graphs using the new animation options on the OPTIONS statement and the PRINTER destination. A popular example an
I recently read an interesting article in The Economist, where they describe "The Big Mac index." This is an index they invented as a lighthearted guide to compare currencies in different countries. In their article they create a multi-panel display (similar to a dashboard) where they compare the index for several countries using
A good chunk of the SAS year revolves around SAS Global Forum. Pre-conference, everyone is busy polishing presentations and planning meetings. Post-conference is the best—attendees come back to Cary with heads full of customer ideas to implement and notebooks full of contacts to follow up on. One user's request found its
Humans have over 10,000 taste buds which are made up of hundreds of receptor cells that control our sense of taste. Each type of receptor responds to one of these 5 basic tastes: Sweet: activated by presence of sugars (ie: fruit, sugary drinks, desserts) Salty: activated by presence sodium chloride
Last week I discussed a program that had three nested loops that used scalar operations in the innermost loop. I mentioned that this program was not vectorized, and would therefore be slow in a matrix language such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, or R. I then went through a series of steps
Last week I alluded to some very useful applications of the Copy Files task. This is one of them. If you have SAS Enterprise Guide 7.13 or later, the Copy Files task is in the Tasks->Data menu. In earlier versions, you'll have to download/install the task as a custom task.
Every time you see a rainbow, do you look to see where it begins and where it ends? Legend has it that there is a pot of gold at the end of each rainbow with leprechauns guarding it. While this might be popular Irish folklore, and you may not find
For programmers who are learning the SAS/IML language, it is sometimes confusing that there are two kinds of multiplication operators, whereas in the SAS DATA step there is only scalar multiplication. This article describes the multiplication operators in the SAS/IML language and how to use them to perform common tasks
Recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide (version 5.1 and later) use Microsoft .NET 4.0, which enforces additional security requirements before running custom task DLLs that you download from the Web, including those that you download from support.sas.com. Because these task DLLs are downloaded from the (big and scary) Internet, the
Students with missing test scores are often highly mobile students and are more likely to be low-achieving students. It is important to include these students in any growth/value-added model to avoid selection bias, which could provide misleading growth estimates to districts, schools and teachers that serve higher populations of these
SAS Global Forum 2013 is a couple weeks in the past, but the feedback and anticipation shared by customers as they heard about SAS 9.4 are still fresh in our minds here at SAS. As we put the final touches on the June release, the excitement we felt in San
The PharmaSUG 2013 conference in Chicago this week was awesome. From the perspective of graphics, there was great interest in using SG Procedures, Designer and GTL for building clinical graphs. It was nice to see many papers by users on how they are using these tools for creating graphs on a daily
A few months ago I released the Copy Files task for use with SAS Enterprise Guide. The task allows you to transfer any files between your PC and a SAS Workspace session, much like an FTP process. It doesn't rely on FTP though; it uses a combination of SAS code,
Are you an NFL fan, or curious about analyzing social media data? -- Well, in either case, this blog's for you! I recently read a fascinating Facebook article that included a U.S. county map showing which NFL (U.S. football) team had the most 'likes' in each county (based on ~35 million
As we have seen my previous post "Seeing SAS data through metadata", there is a fundamental difference between accessing a SAS library using a physical reference or a metadata reference to that library. By now, you should now be an expert on the nuances of physical references to SAS data
Last week someone posted an interesting question to the SAS/IML Support Community. The problem involved four nested DO loops and took hours to run. By transforming several nested DO loops into an equivalent matrix operation, I was able to reduce the run time to about one second. The process of
Ever heard your grandmother say when you were little: If you have your heart set in the right place, you can achieve anything you set out to do! That’s what SAS users tried to do at SAS Global Forum 2013 held at Moscone West, San Francisco. The conference had a
I've conducted a lot of univariate analyses in SAS, yet I'm always surprised when the best way to carry out the analysis uses a SAS regression procedure. I always think, "This is a univariate analysis! Why am I using a regression procedure? Doesn't a regression require at least two variables?"
Do you remember when CPU time was a high-priced commodity? "Today, if you are any good at what you do, the constrained resource is you," says Timothy Berryhill from Wells Fargo. Berryhill has years of experience with SAS on "many platforms and operating systems." He says there are several things
The SAS Global Forum conference last week was awesome. From the perspective of graphics, there were more papers from uses on graphics and ODS graphics then in recent times. I will post a summary shortly. One of the interesting papers was "#113-2013 - Creating Clark Error Grid using SAS/GRAPH and Annotate..."
In today's fast-paced, jam-packed work day, many people answer email and read reports after business hours. And more and more, they're doing those things on a smartphone or tablet. How are your users accessing and using your reports? Statistics South Africa has found that their end-users would prefer a mobile
At a recent conference, I talked with a SAS customer who told me that he was using an R package to create a three-panel visualization of a distribution. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the name of the package, and he has not returned my e-mails, so the purpose of today's article
Even though it's been around for well over a decade, SAS Enterprise Guide was still a hot topic among attendees at SAS Global Forum this year. In the Technology Connection -- the big session on Monday morning -- SAS R&D staff used the conference agenda content to demonstrate the power
