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
“Frankenstorm” is what the U.S. National Weather Service is calling the combination of Hurricane Sandy, an early winter storm heading east, and a blast of arctic air from the North. SAS headquarters is located in the middle of the U.S. east coast ... and we barely missed being the bulls-eye for this
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
If you're like me, you hate all those pop-ups you get suggesting (or sometimes forcing) that you install an upgrade such as Windows, Java, browsers, phone apps, etc, etc. And quite often they don't convince you why you'd want to upgrade (will life be better?) ... they just tell you to
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
After installing SAS Business Intelligence, I would also suggest verifying that all is working appropriately before adding users or importing content from another machine. (My template checklist is included below.) The act of creating the content is an extremely important test (to immediately rectify issues with accessing data, or saving
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
Back in February, I posted an article on creating Adverse Event Timeline Graph. In the SAS 9.2 version (first one), one item that was less than ideal was the way to position the AE names to the left of the event. The AE names are displayed using the scatter plot statement
According to the Daily Writing Tips blog, describing a thing as "somewhat unique" is bad form. Unique means "one of a kind", so either it is or it is not. The famous example (which the style police will use to chide you) is that you can't have something as "somewhat
The first step is to answer the question of what “real-time” actually means. Depending on the program and industry speed of response, I’ve heard answers that varied from milliseconds for the biggest banks in processing credit card charges to 24 hours for some government programs. A better description of what
I’ve heard it said that the only thing you can count on in life is change. The same can be said of technology. Change is certain, and the rate of change seems to accelerate with each passing year. Change requires us to adapt, but as we race to keep up with
I'm going to handle this Friday's Innovation Inspiration a bit differently from the way I usually do; rather than helping you find information so that you can try this on your own, I'd like to know what you would use to display fish mating calls. Obviously you would need a few
You may still believe that Hadoop is going to solve all of the world’s problems with big data. It won’t. Hadoop is a framework for storing large-scale data processing with both pros and cons for organizations. Christopher Stevens, from Greenplum, explained that Hadoop is rapidly becoming the go-to for big
Leanne Tang has learned a lot about encoding in her work of providing relevant user data and securing the database from accidental changes. There are hundreds of SAS users at the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Tang didn’t want to create thousands of accounts and passwords to allow those users to
This SESUG conference was a very energetic and rewarding experience, with many user presentations on graphics using SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics. One standout presentation for me was on "Data Merging and Exploration to Identify Associations Between Environmental Factors and Disease Outbreaks" by Neeta Shenvi, et. al. The key part of
Congratulations to all of these winners in the MWSUG Best Contibuted Papers! I hope you have all submitted your papers to the 2013 SAS Global Forum. The deadline for submissions ends soon! Here's a list that I know you have all been waiting for:
Leanne Tang had a problem. She has one giant database that houses data from all of the units at National Agricultural Statistics Service. She has hundreds of people who need access, but she wants individual users to have access only to the data that meets their needs. In Tang’s
Program update for 2013! The SAS Training Roadshow is back on tour. This year, we’re heading out to six rockin’ cities. We’d love to see you there. Cleveland - St. Louis – Portland - San Jose - Indianapolis - Las Vegas. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In my previous post, I revealed my top
