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
Sometimes a graph is more interpretable if you assign specific colors to categories. For example, if you are graphing the number of Olympic medals won by various countries at the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to assign the colors gold, silver, and bronze to represent first-, second-, and third-place
Do you finish the Word Search in the Sunday paper? Several years ago, Robert Matthews decided to design a word search to help his kids in their school work. Matthews wanted to be able to put in the words of his choice and provide difficulty levels so that game users could
The Macro facility is a powerful and flexible tool, but sloppy techniques can make macros one of your biggest headaches. Poorly handled macros may run without error but leave your users with unexpected results and litter your system with unwanted files and variables.
Living in the Washington, D.C. area I expect the morning news shows to spend a lot of time reporting on traffic. Crashes on the beltway, downed power lines delaying train service…that’s a normal day. D.C. is the most congested city, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual report.). Commuting to
I've been finishing up just a bit of the "boilerplate" content for my forthcoming book about custom tasks. One of the final tasks is to write the introduction, also known as the "About this Book" section. SAS Press offers a template with examples of a few essential topics to address
Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single
The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually interesting graphics for the general public. However, because their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
Andy Pulkstenis of State Farm thinks it is, stating that this red-headed stepchild among modeling technques is where predictive modeling was ten years ago. He opened his talk, "Do You Know or Do You Think You Know? Creating a Testing Culture at State Farm," at the A2012 conference in Las Vegas with
You've all heard about the recent meningitis outbreak, right? Being a data-guy and a map-guy, I went looking for maps related to the outbreak. I found the following map on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It shows the states that received the recalled drug used in epidurals (for back
Jessica Dunn, a Bank of America Vice President, helps coordinate the planning, forecasting and performance of the bank's credit card services. In January 2010, the credit card services division began investigating new business intelligence products to help provide more efficient forecasting and more informed business decisions in general. The decision
Have you registered for the 20th annual SouthEast SAS Users Group conference (SESUG) yet? NO? What are you waiting for? I've heard it going to be a real party, so come help us celebrate SESUG's 20th birthday (hmm ... SESUG isn't even old enough to drink). The last time I went was
Sunny days, keeping the clouds away, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?? Oops, sorry, was just day dreaming about younger days and the magic of an eight foot talking yellow bird. How great was Sesame Street? I learned counting, my abc’s, sharing, diversity,
Beans aren’t just good for your heart; they’re affordable, convenient, and packed with nutrients that have a wide range of health benefits including lowered LDL cholesterol, blood sugar control, weight management, and more. Beans are an excellent plant-based source of protein and fiber and are rich in minerals such as
~ Lisa Pyle and Rob Russell, NESUG 2012 Conference Co-chairs Can you believe it?! In just a few weeks we will all be together at NESUG's 25th conference! We are looking forward to all the presentations and workshops we have planned and to seeing all our old friends and meeting some new ones too.
Last week I wrote a SAS/IML program that computes the odds of winning the game of craps. I noted that the program remains valid even if the dice are not fair. For convenience, here is a SAS/IML function that computes the probability of winning at craps, given the probability vector
You might know about the many automatic macro variables that are available in SAS. They provide plenty of information about the SAS environment, such as the current user (SYSUSERID), the SAS version (SYSVER and SASVLONG), and the operating system where SAS is running (SYSCP and SYSCPL). That information is often
As SLG’s health policy specialist, I’m chartered with developing novel ways to apply data analytics to our state government health systems. If you ask me, it’s the perfect blend of technology and policy - two of my favorite things. However, I sometimes find it challenging to identify the areas within
It is easy to simulate data that is uniformly distributed in the unit cube for any dimension. However, it is less obvious how to generate data in the unit simplex. The simplex is the set of points (x1,x2,...,xd) such that Σi xi = 1 and 0 ≤ xi ≤ 1
The Scatter Plot Matrix statement supports a couple of different configurations. The basic is the N x N panel of cells, with each cell showing scatter plots plot for a pair of variables at a time. Here is an example of a 3 x 3 scatter plot matrix for the
A year ago I set out to periodically blog from my perspective of leading R&D for our advanced analytics software. I invited SAS colleagues who also work in various areas of advanced analytics to blog on their own interesting conversations with each other and with customers about the intersection of
SAS/GRAPH gives you the ability to customize your graphs (or even create totally new types of custom graphs) ... and it is my firm belief that it gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to "make sense" of your data in ways your competitors can't. Most of the examples in
I have to say that I've never heard of the Bubble option, so I looked it up on support.sas.com (my go-to place for searches on customer problems or to simply to learn something about SAS). The search led me to documentation for the statement options in SAS ODS Graphics. So, I assume the
As much as I enjoy dramatic reinterpretations, for this blog post I’m just going to talk to you about the complex challenges municipal organizations face in setting spending priorities. The complexity stems from competing aspects of the various projects vying for funding. Some of these factors are related to the
Gambling games that use dice, such as the game of "craps," are often used to demonstrate the laws of probability. For two dice, the possible rolls and probability of each roll are usually represented by a matrix. Consequently, the SAS/IML language makes it easy to compute the probabilities of various
It may only be early October, but now is the ideal time to plan, save and prepare for SAS Global Forum 2013, scheduled for April 28 – May 1 in San Francisco. Three Quick Recommendations 1. Check out the pre- and post-conference classes – The topics are great and the
Milestone achieved: I've completed the final chapter of Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET and turned it over to SAS Press for editing and production. It's scheduled to be available in early 2013. I committed to writing this book nearly 5 years ago. I'll engage in
John D. Cook posted a story about Hardy, Ramanujan, and Euler and discusses a conjecture in number theory from 1937. Cook says, Euler discovered 635,318,657 = 158^4 + 59^4 = 134^4 + 133^4 and that this was the smallest [integer]known to be the sum of two fourth powers in two
Next stop on our SAS users’ group road trip – October 14-16 in Research Triangle Park, NC, for the 20th Annual SouthEastern SAS Users Group Conference. Hello! This is my first post to the SAS Users Groups blog and what a fun way to start. Granted, the Triangle doesn’t have
