As student growth or value-added measures become more prevalent in educator evaluation systems, many question how those ratings actually help teachers improve their practice. i.e. “How does a level 3 teacher become a level 4 or 5?” Robust and reliable value-added data serve as a great starting point for teachers
Editor's Note: My 8th grade son, David, created a poster that he submitted to the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The competition encourages students to display "two or more related graphics that summarize a set of data, look at the data from different points of view, and answer specific questions about
The graphs produced by the SG procedures (and GTL) have a default look and feel designed for the common use cases. However, everyone has a preference for some special features that make the graphs unique. Fortunately, extensive customizations can be made to graphs produced by these tools using statement and
John Taylor likes computer data the way he likes big trout: here, there or anywhere. Which is perfectly natural, considering he’s the data analyst in the Inland Fisheries Department at Texas Parks and Wildlife. Taylor describes his unspoiled enthusiasm for big data and big fish in this sendup of Dr. Seuss that
If you're a software developer, you're probably already familiar with these terms: I18N and L10N. Internationalization (I + 18 letters + N = I18N) The discipline of preparing your software to run correctly in different languages with different culture settings. For example, the software must be able to accommodate multibyte
An updated version of the SAS Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SASHFADD) has just been released on the SAS Technical Support Hot Fix site. If you are not familiar with SASHFADD (pronounced SAS-H-F-ADD), it’s a tool that will analyze a SAS 9.2, SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.4 deployment
My previous post described the multinomial distribution and showed how to generate random data from the multinomial distribution in SAS by using the RANDMULTINOMIAL function in SAS/IML software. The RANDMULTINOMIAL function is simple to use and implements an efficient algorithm called the sequential conditional marginal method (see Gentle (2003), p.
With the pervasiveness of mobile devices, being able to read while “on the go” has been easier than ever. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you pass the time waiting by reading something on your phone/iPad/tablet etc? With eBooks on my iPad, I find that
As promised, here is a better combined AE-CM graph, using some of the UI improvements suggested by our UI expert, Riley. His suggestions helped to reduce the clutter in the graph, while still keeping all the features preferred by our users. Click on the graphs for a higher resolution image.
Celebrations happen throughout the year. Here at SAS, we like to celebrate our users. The global Circle of Excellence program was started a little over a year ago to achieve this goal. We have been getting stories from you guys and posting them. Well, a new group for 2013 has
This article describes how to generate random samples from the multinomial distribution in SAS. The content is taken from Chapter 8 of my book Simulating Data with SAS. The multinomial distribution is a discrete multivariate distribution. Suppose there are k different types of items in a box, such as a
With the release of SAS 9.4 (which included SAS/STAT 12.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1), you might seriously consider hiring a Chief Versions Officer (CVO). Fortunately, most of the recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide work with the different recent versions of SAS, so you have some flexibility as you
Missing San Francisco already? I caught up with the SAS Global Forum 2013 paper winners and asked them to share some of their insights about their work, the conference and what they took away from the experience. To kick off this series, I've posted their words of wisdom for other SAS Users. The question was
How old is your version of SAS software? The graph on the left shows the release dates for various releases of SAS software, beginning with SAS 8.0. The graph is based on a graph on Jiangtang Hu's blog that shows the major SAS releases up through the initial release of
At the SAS Global Forum 2013 in San Francisco, I presented a paper on making Patient Profile Graphs using SAS. You can follow the link to see the graphs presented in this paper. In that paper, I presented ways to create AE, CM, VS and Lab graphs. I discussed aligning the
Previously I've described how you can use SAS Enterprise Guide to send an e-mail message using Gmail as your e-mail provider. In the article, I mentioned that you can also write SAS programs that send e-mail messages, but at the time you could not reach Gmail using the FILENAME EMAIL
Users often ask if there are any major tuning efforts that need to be made in order for SAS to execute ideally in a virtual environment. The quick answer is "not really". The longer answer is “it helps to set up your virtual environment properly.” There are a few minor
Do you have dozens (or even hundreds) of SAS data sets that you want to read into SAS/IML matrices? In a previous blog post, I showed how to iterate over a series of data sets and analyze each one. Inside the loop, I read each data set into a matrix
From an Enterprise Guide user's perspective, a SAS library is a library. Whether it was defined in the autoexec or in the metadata or by magic, it is there for them to use with no issues. However, there is a difference as metadata defined libraries do not behave in the
One of my favorite features of SAS/IML 12.1 (released with 9.3m2) is that the USE and CLOSE statements support reading data set names that are specified in a SAS/IML matrix. The IMLPlus language in SAS/IML Studio has supported this syntax since the early 2000s, so I am pleased that this
The truncated normal distribution TN(μ, σ, a, b) is the distribution of a normal random variable with mean μ and standard deviation σ that is truncated on the interval [a, b]. I previously blogged about how to implement the truncated normal distribution in SAS. A friend wanted to simulate data
Christina Harvey recently forwarded this question from SAS user Bob Wasicak to several administrators here at SAS: “Does the metadata layer capture the number of login's per user? And how can I get at it? I have been using the metadata browser but would like to write a query to extract
Tofu can be a great addition to your protein rotation. I love tofu! I've been eating it for almost 20 years and have tried it almost any way you could think of. I am always amazed when people turn up their nose at tofu, and they’ve never even tried it!
This article describes how to implement the truncated normal distribution in SAS. Although the implementation in this article uses the SAS/IML language, you can also implement the ideas and formulas by using the DATA step and PROC FCMP. For reference, I recommend the Wikipedia article on the truncated normal distribution.
Professional development, popularity, untold fame: the benefits of submitting a paper to a SAS conference are certainly varied and widespread! In a recent SAS Users LinkedIn discussion started by David Corliss, avid SAS users and former presenters discussed their motivations for writing, researching and presenting papers. From the many wonderful
There are many techniques for generating random variates from a specified probability distribution such as the normal, exponential, or gamma distribution. However, one technique stands out because of its generality and simplicity: the inverse CDF sampling technique. If you know the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a probability distribution, then
SAS Global Forum is a three-day, education-focused and energy-packed conference – created by SAS users, for SAS users. Next year’s event will be in Washington D.C., March 23-26. Featuring the best and brightest SAS users and experts from all over the globe, SAS Global Forum 2014 offers the SAS community the chance
ODS graph styles provide users with an easy way to control things such as the colors and fonts used in a graph, freeing the user from having to specify these properties in their code. A lot of thought was given to picking colors that work well together, and look good. The
I love tables. As a writer, there's nothing more satisfying to me than distilling complicated information into neat rows and columns. That's one of the features that caught my eye in SAS User ID and Password Usage Rules. The other is its potential usefulness for SAS administrators who manage SAS
In a previous article I discussed how to bin univariate observations by using the BIN function, which was added to the SAS/IML language in SAS/IML 9.3. You can generalize that example and bin bivariate or multivariate data. Over two years ago I wrote a blog post on 2D binning in
