This summer’s education conferences have been dominated by sessions discussing the “next generation,” Common Core aligned assessments in English and mathematics. As 44 states plan for the transition from their state tests to the new PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium assessments, SAS has received repeated questions from our partners
If you remember Andy Kuligowski for nothing else, you probably remember that he was the SAS Global Forum conference chair for 2012. I remember that he has a wonderful sense of humor, which he used more than once during his Hands on Workshop at the MidWest SAS Users Group conference
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book: Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET. If your custom task generates a SAS program, the chances are pretty high that your program will reference one or more variables within a SAS data set. Despite our best efforts,
You may recall that I am a novice SAS user - I've been using SAS for about two years now and work for Canada's largest pediatric hospital as a database administrator and data analyst. In April, during SAS Global Forum 2012, I wrote my first blog post on the SAS Users
Sometimes it is useful to group observations based on the values of some variable. Common schemes for grouping include binning and using quantiles. In the binning approach, a variable is divided into k equal intervals, called bins, and each observation is assigned to a bin. In this scheme, the size
Diane Olson, from SAS, wrote a SAS Global Forum paper in 2011 that seems ready-made for this SAS user's Post-It note. Olson wrote about PROC COPY and PROC APPEND. In her paper, she lets you in on the inside tricks on how to clone your data set to the same library, copy
Detecting and preventing fraud isn't easy. Many tools and techniques are required, and while the digital age and advanced technologies have made fraud much easier in many ways, those same technologies have opened up new ways to combat it. One of those comes in the form of social network analysis,
Chris Hemedinger is not the only person who’s excited about the capabilities of SAS Enterprise Guide. Tom Miron, from Systems Seminar Consultants, a SAS author with more than 35 years of SAS experience, shared some great advice for using SAS Enterprise Guide.
Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have read through a few Dear Miss SAS Answers blog posts, but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. I need to extract only the second duplicate from a whole list of duplicates per account number. Is there a way to
There are five short, simple, quick rules to help you take advantage of indexes. An index lets you retrieve information from SAS data sets or tables. And according to Kirk Paul Lafler, if you keep these rules in mind, your information retrieval will be more efficient. Lafler is the Senior
With the US presidential election looming, all eyes are on the Electoral College. In the presidential election, each state gets as many votes in the Electoral College as it has representatives in both congressional houses. (The District of Columbia also gets three electors.) Because every state has two senators, it
Last week I attended a meeting of the Toronto Area SAS Society. (Okay, I didn't just attend; I was a presenter as well.) This user group meeting contained a feature that I had never seen before: "Solutions to the Posed Problem". Weeks before the meeting, an "open problem" was posted
Are you just starting out in your career? What if you think you’ve been around the block and there is nothing new you can do in your career? Everyone has their own perspective on what career planning is, but Bill Donovan from OckhamSource has a plan to help SAS users make a career
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
