True to its central theme "Strength in Numbers", SAS Global Forum 2013 is opening conference doors even wider this year and welcoming the SAS community to participate wherever you are. So sit back and enjoy the show!
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
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
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
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
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
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 the
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
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:
I was recently asked how to compute the difference between two density estimates in SAS. The person who asked the question sent me a link to a paper from The Review of Economics and Statistics that contains several examples of this technique (for example, see Figure 3 on p. 16
You created a graph of Response over Time by Severity where Severity has three levels, "Severe", "Moderate' and "Mild". How do you ensure that "Severe" is always red in your graph, regardless of the data order? Normally, when creating any graph with a GROUP role, the distinct group values are assigned the style
In a previous article, I described how to use Windows PowerShell to connect to a remote SAS Workspace, run a SAS program, and retrieve the results. In that example, the only results I retrieved were the SAS log and SAS listing (text) output, if any. When you run a SAS
The Data Scientist has been called the sexiest job of the 21st century. And, 2013 is the International Year of Statistics. With all this focus and attention, it’s no longer What NOT to wear at SAS Global Forum but WHAT DO YOU WEAR? Fashion trends for 2013 have been getting
Did you know that your ODS style might result in changing the color ramp for contour plots and heat maps? For example, the default style in SAS 9.3 is HTMLBlue. Let's create a contour plot in the HTML destination by running an example adapted from the documentation for the RSREG
