Disasters like Hurricane Sandy, by and large, shine a positive light on humanity, with the heroic actions of first responders and volunteers, and the massive outpouring of support from across the nation. They also present fraud opportunities for the shady operators and criminals among us. Hurricanes leave behind a lot
Recently, SAS Talks hosted a webinar to give SAS users an overview of the new features and functions available in the new release of SAS Enterprise BI Server. Rick Styll, BI Global Product Manager at SAS, says that most of the enhancements were prioritized based on customer feedback.
In the U.S. we have a presidential election every 4 years - and as luck would have it, 2012 is an election year! I see a lot of election maps & graphs in the news, and I'm always subconsciously critiquing them in my mind and thinking to myself, "How would I graph this
OK all you mamas and papas, and SAS users who aren’t. It’s time to turn your SAS Global Forum dreams into a reality. Registration for the 2013 event is now open. The event promises to offer no time for “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” with an anticipated 400
Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid's small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my "digital pack-rat" issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a project I worked 3 years
I recently encountered a SUGI30 paper by Chuck Kincaid entitled "Guidelines for Selecting the Covariance Structure in Mixed Model Analysis." I think Kincaid does a good job of describing some common covariance structures that are used in mixed models. One of the many uses for SAS/IML is as a language
The North East SAS Users Group Conference (NESUG) will be held November 11-14, in Baltimore, Maryland. I’m psyched to be attending this year, and hope I’ll see you there.
In the previous post on Violin Plots, we discussed the process to create custom density plots. This work was done in collaboration with SAS user James Marcus. This is the second installment on the same topic - Creating Density Strip Plots. We will use the same data and process to compute
We all have some sort of intuitive idea of what time series data is – it’s a bunch of measurements or observations that are marked by a time stamp – we know when the measurement was taken, as well as what was measured. This natural temporal ordering of the data
As part of the Friday's Innovation Inspiration (FII) series, I've decided to present a few SAS techniques and problem solvers that you labeled as innovative or 'inspirational'. These are pretty easy to find: I've done some digging through the Best Contributed Papers. I know you haven't read them all, so
K-12 education reform and policy has seen a recent surge in the cinema with "Waiting for Superman," "The Lottery," and this fall’s "Won't Back Down.” However, if you can’t bring yourself to spend $9.00+ at the box office, or (like me) have a hard time finding babysitters to even get
You’ve just started a new job as SAS administrator, and there’s no documentation. How do you know which SAS products are installed? Where they are deployed? Where do the data and programs reside? Brian Varney tells us that SAS administrators often run into undocumented environments whenever they begin working in a new
The determinant of a matrix arises in many statistical computations, such as in estimating parameters that fit a distribution to multivariate data. For example, if you are using a log-likelihood function to fit a multivariate normal distribution, the formula for the log-likelihood involves the expression log(det(Σ)), where Σ is the
With all the news of Sandy, the huge storm which slammed into northeastern US states this week, I wanted to reach out and say our thoughts are with all of the folks in the Northeast region. Many SAS staff, including myself, will be in Maryland in a little over a week
Over the past month or more, I have been in a conversation with SAS user James Marcus, on creation of some new displays for visual communication of uncertainty. These include display of densities using a "Violin" plot, "Density Strips" and more. With his permission, I can share some of the
Just a quick note to let you know about some changes: Have you noticed our beautiful new banner art. If not, look up. :-) We changed it because the SAS Users Groups blog is part of the newly expanded SAS Users Group social family. In May 2012, we expanded the
I work on a variety of projects at SAS, most of which require some level of team collaboration in source management systems. Due to the many technologies that we work with, SAS developers use different source management tools for different purposes. I've got projects in CVS, Subversion, and Git. When
Our SAS Users Group regional road trip is coming to an end. Final destination -Baltimore, MD. That will be the site of the Northeast SAS Users Group regional conference November 11-14. More than 500 users are expected to come together to share ideas, learn from experts, and increase their SAS
BASE SAS users are already familiar with the autoexec file. This is a .sas file that typically resides in the installation folder of the SAS executable. Instructions for setting it up in UNIX, Windows, and other environments is readily available on the SAS website. In SAS BI configurations there are
I was looking at some SAS documentation when I saw a Base SAS function that I never knew existed. The NWKDOM function returns the date for the nth occurrence of a weekday for the specified month and year. I surely could have used that function last spring when I blogged
What do disaster planning and baseball have in common? (Cue Cubs fans, "We plan on every season being a disaster!") Bear with me... Watching game 1 of the World Series reminded me of the time I took my son to AT&T Park to see the Giants play. It was the day
Never been to Houston? November 5-6 is perfect for your first trip. Make plans to see some of what the fourth-largest city in the US has to offer; there are some famous visitor destinations - and some not well-known. The South Central SAS Users group is holding its annual SAS Educational Forum in this
It's hard to get away from data these days, especially Big Data. The news is full of stories about how fast it's accumulating, about technologies for capturing and analyzing it, and about the creative ways organizations are using it. Pundits have even dubbed personal data the “new oil” that will
Trick or Treat! Halloween and its endless candy supply marks the beginning of a continuous stream of social gatherings, family meals, and tempting holiday foods from October to January. For many, this also means unwanted extra pounds. However, you can still enjoy Halloween without breaking the calorie bank; you just
There are a lot of useful probability distributions that are not featured in standard statistical textbooks. Some of them have distinctive names. In the past year I have had contact with SAS customers who use the Tweedie distribution, the slash distribution, and the PERT distribution. Often these distributions are used
While 2012 has been a very active hurricane season in terms of total storms, the effects on life and property have been relatively small and the need for disaster recovery less than many years. Let's all be thankful for that. Right now, Tropical Storm Sandy is threatening Jamaica and the
In my 26 plus years of experience, I would contend that the best SAS administrator would be an individual with a deeply skilled understanding of server and/or desktop administration, as well as SAS software usage.
It's not too early to think about what presentations and pre-conference training to attend while at SAS Global Forum 2012. Tutorials are an extra-fee that is only available as additions to a conference registration. But you can get a deal: Registration package 3 includes your choice of one Sunday Pre-Conference Tutorial.
Sigurd Hermansen, from Westat, got his idea for breaking big data into small pieces after watching Jim Goodnight dissect a blade server to show the power high-performance analytics has processing for big data. Goodnight also demonstrated how Visual Analytics Explorer transfers the data from the servers to a workstation and
What's in a name? As Shakespeare's Juliet said, "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." A similar statement holds true for the names of colors in SAS: "Rose" by any other name would look as red! SAS enables you to specify a
