Every fall (fall in the US, that is), I try to attend as many SAS Users Groups events as humanly possible. This year, I’m starting with the MidWest SAS Users Groups conference in Minneapolis, then SouthEast SAS Users Group conference in Durham, NC (my home base) and finishing the season
Your SAS user experience matters to me and to everyone at SAS. That’s the reason we continue to build customer-focused programs. We want learn as much as possible about your experience: How do you interact with us? With which departments do you interact most, and what successes and challenges do
“It’s the age of the search engine! I remember people ‘Yahoo!’ing during the late 90's and ‘Google’ing till the late 2k's and now ‘Bing’ing. I just wondered, ‘Why not SAS?’” wrote Pramod. R on his blog SASopedia. This was the beginning of a quest and a MidWest SAS Users Groups
There are times when programmers need to know the source of the data sets used in a program. This macro, designed by Prasanna Murugesan and Sushant Thakare from Quintiles Inc., will help you extract the lib names from various programs and put them in an Excel file.
So, here we are – back to our normal routines of school, work is in full-swing, and the Toronto Area Users Group (TASS) starts up again. I really wish everything else started off this fall as well as TASS did – talk about an exceptional group of presenters, talks and people!
Who says anyone is an expert at something? I definitely do not when it comes to SAS (well, anything for that matter). Each time I sit through a presentation at a conference I learn something new. During the SAS Western Users Conference, fondly know as WUSS, this month I learned
If you use a word three times, it's yours. -Unknown When I was a child, my mother used to encourage me to increase my vocabulary by saying, "If you use a word three times, it's yours for life." I believe that the same saying holds for programming techniques: Use a
A week ago, SAS "wusses" got together in Long Beach, California for another successful WUSS conference. Personally, I really enjoy all SAS user conferences as it gives me an opportunity to see the creative ways in which SAS users are exploiting our software. One such case was the paper "Power
I know that for every SAS user event there are many people who aren't able to attend or who have to choose between two or more great sessions. So a couple of days ago, I started a discussion on several SAS users LinkedIn groups asking those of you who are attending SAS Users Groups
Government pensions at the state and local government level have come under attack in recent years over their viability. Much of this attack has been political and is being used to go after unions and pensioners who tend to support one party or another. State and local governments work hard to maintain viable
Last time on our road trip, I headed out West for the WUSS Conference in Long Beach, California. Now, I’m going North — to the Midwest, to be precise! Minneapolis, Minnesota is the home of this year’s Midwest SAS Users Group (MWSUG) Conference and the next stop on our virtual
This article is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Simulating Data with SAS. Not every matrix with 1 on the diagonal and off-diagonal elements in the range [–1, 1] is a valid correlation matrix. A correlation matrix has a special property known as positive semidefiniteness. All correlation matrices are positive
After weeks of anticipation, one of fall’s best offerings, Football Season, is here! Hot diggity!!! Now many sports fans view this as a total positive, but those who have been working hard all summer to shave percentage points off their body fat and boost their fitness levels recognize football season’s
This is a dramatic interpretation of an actual conversation I recently had with the CIO of one of North Carolina’s leading cities. We discussed his experience using data quality, data integration, business intelligence and analytics in the daily operation of the city. I may have taken some...well, a lot of
Robert Allison posted a map that shows the average commute times for major US cities, along with the proportion of the commute that is attributed to traffic jams and other congestion. The data are from a CEOs for Cities report (Driven Apart, 2010, p. 45). Robert use SAS/GRAPH software to
Ah! The joys of sets! It is easy to test whether two vectors are equal in SAS/IML software. It is only slightly more challenging to test whether two sets are equal. Recall that A and B are equal as sets if they contain the same elements. Order does not matter.
As summer comes to an end, I find myself getting excited about some of the regional user group conferences that take place every fall. This year, I’ll be presenting a paper at WUSS (Western Users of SAS Software) in Long Beach, CA, in early September. About one week later, I’m
Planning for SAS Global Forum 2013 is well underway and it’s time you get involved through the Call for Papers! As the 2013 SAS Global Forum conference chair, I cannot emphasize enough how much we rely on your creative tips and tricks to contribute to the invaluable content provided at
I needed to construct a string to use in the title of a scatter plot. The scatter plot showed a line, and I wanted to include the equation of the line in the plot's title. This article shows how to construct a string that contains the equation in a readable
A few weeks ago I wrote an article on using the non breaking space character to prevent stripping of leading and trailing blanks in a string. Since then, I have discovered a few more instances where the nbsp can be a useful tool for creating graphs. One such instance came up last week
It’s that time of year again! The leaves are turning, the days are getting shorter, and all across the country, SAS users are getting ready for the annual users group conferences. To get people excited about the upcoming events, I’ll be hitting the road—metaphorically, at least—and virtually visiting each of
One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this
A super hot topic in most organizations is how to make the most of the troves of social data available. This Post-It Note author isn't specific about the SAS solution that is being used, so I'm going to speculate that he or she is taking advantage of SAS Text Miner, SAS Text
I follow Andrew Ratcliff's NOTE: blog, and thought you might want to check out his latest post. I've reprinted it below (you'll notice that I'm a bit behind the times): NOTE: SGF Call for Papers 2013 Opens Tomorrow #sasgf13 The Call for Papers for next year's SAS Global Forum (SGF) opens
Magic squares are cool. Algorithms that create magic squares are even cooler. You probably remember magic squares from your childhood: they are n x n matrices that contain the numbers 1,2,...,n2 and for which the row sum, column sum, and the sum of both diagonals are the same value. There are many
“Ohio links teacher pay to test scores” was the headline of a recent CNN School of Thought blog. Yikes! With a headline like that, teachers might start heading for the hills. I kept reading through the blog hoping that it would better explain Ohio’s policy to use student growth data
When I studied math in school, I learned that the expression a (mod n) is always an integer between 0 and q – 1 for integer values of a and q. It's a nice convention, but SAS and many other computer languages allow the result to be negative if a (or q) is
Pie charts have been the subject of some criticism when they are used to compare measures across multiple categories. It is generally accepted that comparison of magnitudes represented as angular measures from varying baselines is not effective. However here are some use cases where a pie chart does quite well. When it comes
It's always great to hear that SAS users get to thump their chests a bit around statisticians and programmers who are struggling because they are trying to solve problems using software provided by those "other" companies. Now, that's inspiring.
As a trainer for SAS Education Australia and chairperson of the local SAS User Group, QUEST (Queensland Users Exploring SAS Technology) , I meet many new SAS users over the years. In July 2011, I met Kim MacKenzie, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia at an Enterprise
