SAS experts are gearing up to share knowledge, expertise and insights at SAS Global Forum 2012 In the last two months alone, we have launched SAS 9.3, created a think tank on healthcare analytics, hired a Chief Medical Officer, released a new version of Curriculum Pathways and offered flashcards for
What is the best way to organize your SAS work in a SAS Enterprise Guide project? There are no project templates or enforced structure, really, but isn't there a best practice? I don't have a single prescription for the best project organization. I believe that it depends on the nature
To celebrate the first anniversary of Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, you can now download the SAS/IML tip sheets (also called "cheat sheets") that I created for the book. At conferences, SAS Press displays these tip sheets next to my book. They have been very popular. Download these SAS/IML cheat
Chris Hemedinger, author of the SAS Dummy blog, read last week's Innovation Inspiration post and was reminded of a couple of cool things he'd seen SAS users do. He also told me of one of his most recent rock star moments. (In all fairness to Hemedinger, he didn't call his
I've noticed that a lot of people want to be able to draw bar charts with confidence intervals. This topic is a frequent posting on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Discussion Forum and on the SAS-L mailing list. Consequently, this post describes how to add errors bars to a bar
With an increasing volume of curriculum to cover and no time to spare, teachers often hit the ground running with the full throttle rigor and relevance critical to teaching and learning. However, I argue that the first two R’s are futile if teachers don’t have meaningful relationships with their students.
It turns out that I'm not receiving the maximum potential value from my Netflix streaming service. Perhaps it's because I place too much value on sleep. With my monthly subscription, I am permitted to view Netflix content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In my house I have
Users groups and users group events are a great way to get the most from the software that you use every day: learn new coding and analysis techniques, gain efficiencies and productivity, and meet other SAS users. The final months of 2011 will fly by. Don’t let them escape without
When you misspell a word on your mobile device or in a word-processing program, the software might "autocorrect" your mistake. This can lead to some funny mistakes, such as the following: I hate Twitter's autocorrect, although changing "extreme couponing" to "extreme coupling" did make THAT tweet more interesting. [@AnnMariaStat] When
We’ve talked a lot lately about the overwhelming tide of data – velocity, volume and complexity – that organizations are dealing with. SAS wanted to know how organizations are currently managing "big data," what resources would be required in the future and how to plan for those needs. The Economist
In 1979, my ninth-grade teachers named me "Most Likely to Replace Rona Barrett" on TV's Good Morning America. Although the prediction never came to pass, it did at least stoke my enthusiasm for "conversation" and my passion for "sharing." So, yeah, I can be a real talker sometimes. Up for some spirited, banal chit-chat? Give me a call! Delighted by the meandering
Most SUG presentations are written in PowerPoint – they may even be written in Word first, and then fancied up a bit in PowerPoint – but they are rarely written in SAS. But Louise Hadden, from Abt Associates Inc, had a need to produce a lot of PDF presentations. She
SAS has several ways to round a number to an integer. You can round a number up, round it down, or round it to the nearest integer. If your data contain both positive and negative values, you can also round numbers toward zero, or away from zero. The functions that
I used to get an email with a joke in it every Friday from my former boss, he called it Friday's Funnies. Some were really funny. Some - not so much. Well, I've decided to start my own Friday treat - a new series - called Friday's Innovation Inspiration. I'll be using
Birds migrate south in the fall. Squirrels gather nuts. Humans also have behavioral rituals in the autumn. I change the batteries in my smoke detectors, I switch my clocks back to daylight standard time, and I turn the mattress on my bed. The first two are relatively easy. There's even
Webinar October 4, 1:10 pm ET: What is Your Product Forecastability??? Thanks to Rich Gendon and the Chicago APICS chapter for hosting me last week at their professional development dinner meeting. I always enjoy evening speaking gigs, as they provide a chance to break out some of my nightclub-worthy material.
Every six months or so I try to find a recent picture that captures who I am and what I am feeling. Loading this into my various social/online profiles in Twitter, SAS Community, Forums, LinkedIn, corporate internal, Facebook etc then take me a bit of time to implement. Wouldn't it
I previously wrote about an intriguing math puzzle that involves 5-digit numbers with certain properties. This post presents my solution in the SAS/IML language. It is easy to generate all 5-digit perfect squares, but the remainder of the problem involves looking at the digits of the squares. For this reason,
The Obama Administration and subprime lenders agree on one thing: Borrowers with bad credit lack the clout - both financial and political - to rebuild their lives without help from somebody ... somewhere. Where they disagree - royally - is over how. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of
Wondering about Bloom and what he has to do with SAS programming. For any learner, he is someone to respect. For anyone wishing to learn more about the levels of the learning process, this is the master. Bloom classified cognitive, a big word for thinking skills, into 6 broad categories.
Filed under "Little changes that you probably didn't notice". When Microsoft introduced Windows 7 to the desktop, one of the many usability features that they added were "Jump Lists". Jump Lists serve as a sort of shortcut to not just open an application, but "jump right in" to a particular
A few sharp-eyed readers questioned the validity of a technique that I used to demonstrate two ways to solve linear systems of equations. I generated a random n x n matrix and then proceeded to invert it, seemingly without worrying about whether the matrix even has an inverse! I responded to the
Private sector vendors/suppliers seeking to conduct business with government often find frustration with the maze of policy and legislative hurdles encountered during the procurement process. As difficult as the experience may have been from the private sector perspective, take a moment to look at the other side of the procurement
With a combined 62 years of experience using SAS and JMP, consultants Kirk Paul Lafler and Charles Edwin Shipp have authored countless papers, articles, books - even puzzles - about analytics. Over the years, they've pretty much seen the world more than a few times during their travels to international,
I was intrigued by a math puzzle posted to the SAS Discussion Forum (from New Scientist magazine). The problem is repeated below, but I have added numbers in brackets because I am going to comment on each clue: [1] I have written down three different 5-digit perfect squares, which [2]
Today, I came across this article that discusses how software users rarely change the settings in the applications that they use. Users assume that the software vendor sets the default values as they are for a reason, and who are they to set them otherwise? I'm a software developer (and
I showed a SAS/IML customer a debugging tip, and she said that I should blog about it because she had never seen it before. The tip is very simple: inside of a DO loop, use the MOD function to selectively print the values of variables. Recall that the expression MOD(a,b)
Australian merino wool sweaters, Russian watches, Swiss chocolate, Chinese silk blouses, Canadian country music, American sweatshirts, English knitting patterns, Californian pistachios, French muesli, Egyptian bracelets, Scottish kilts, the list goes on. Was I born in a king’s family? Not really, much as I’d like to think of my dad as
More than 175 users attended the recent one-day conferences sponsored by the Pacific Northwest SAS Users Group (PNWSUG). Conference chairs Sara Beck and Mark Thompson, supported by the PNWSUG Executive Committee, created another great learning experience for SAS users in Seattle (Sept 19) and Portland (Sept 21). However, change is
Over my 32 year career in local government as a city and county manager I was faced with many difficult decisions during budget deliberations. Setting tax and utility rates, adding head count, determining compensation and benefits, calculating the appropriate mix of debt and cash for funding capital projects…these were all
