A popular custom among the diminutive hobbits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth was giving away presents on their birthdays instead of receiving them. This week, SAS toasted its birthday, celebrating 35 years as an analytic innovator, by giving its customers a gift: the latest version of SAS analytics and data management
Most of us grew up playing some type of sport and dreaming of becoming a collegiate or professional athlete. For me, it was a focus on dance and striving to be a professional ballerina. At some point we realized that in order to make this dream a reality, we’d have
In order to make the OLAP drill through data available as data tables in the Enterprise Guide, all you need to do is change the option to automatically insert the results as a data set in the project. This is extremely useful if part of your workflow includes navigating through
Here are a few new interface and graphics changes that every SAS programmer should know about SAS 9.3: HTML is now the default output destination when you run the SAS windowing environment. This means that tables and graphs appear in an HTML document instead of the classic LISTING destination. Of
As I was reviewing notes for my course "Data Simulation for Evaluating Statistical Methods in SAS," I realized that I haven't blogged about simulating categorical data in SAS. This article corrects that oversight. An Easy Way and a Harder Way SAS software makes it easy to sample from discrete "named"
Alison posted the Top 10 Reasons you should care about SAS 9.3. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it reflects just a sample of the thousands of features and tweaks that you'll see in this new release. Even with SAS 9.2, I was nowhere near exhausting my backlog of blog topics...but
In an era when software updates are a dime a dozen, why should you care about SAS 9.3 being available today? With help from my colleagues and fellow bloggers here at SAS, I give you these top ten reasons: When you fill out your brackets during March Madness next spring,
No, I’m not talking about a professional basketball game, though that would be fun to watch. I’m talking about the Joint Statistical Meetings in Miami Beach later this month. Julie Platt, Sharon Brandon and myself will be attending JSM July 31-August 4. A conference in August. In Miami. Um, can
It seems like such a simple problem: how can you reliably compute the age of someone or something? Susan lamented the subtle issues using the YRDIF function exactly 1.0356164384 years ago. Sure, you could write your own function for calculating such things, as I suggested 0.1753424658 years ago. Or you
Arnold Loewy, professor of criminal law at Texas Tech University, wrote an editorial about the Casey Anthony case that has statistical undertones. Prof. Loewy discusses the fact that there are two kinds of errors that can occur in a court trial: an innocent person can be sent to jail or
SAS Enterprise Guide sets values for several useful SAS macro variables when it connects to a SAS session, including one macro variable, &_CLIENTPROJECTPATH, that contains the name and path of the current SAS Enterprise Guide project file. (To learn about this and other macro variables that SAS Enterprise Guide assigns,
"Always clean up after yourself." My mother taught me this, and I apply it to SAS programming as regularly as I apply it at home. For SAS programming, I reinterpret Mom's saying as the following rule: Always delete temporary files and data sets when you are finished using them. How
Besides publishing stellar books on making the most of SAS software, SAS Press also provides several excellent books on using JMP. One such book is Analyzing and Interpreting Continuous Data Using JMP: A Step-by-Step Guide by Jose Ramirez and Brenda Ramirez. Reviews for the book have been strong and you
Last night I had a phone conversation with a car rental customer service rep (CSR) which went somewhat like this: Me - Hi, I’d like to rent a compact car for this Saturday in Toronto. CSR- Your name? Me- Do you have a car available? CSR-I need your name first.
As I write this, SAS 9.3 has not yet been "shipped", but its release is imminent. I've already heard many questions about how SAS Enterprise Guide works with the new version, so I decided to write this "Frequently-soon-to-be-asked questions" document to help sort it out. What version of SAS Enterprise
Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have a problem getting PDF, HTML, and RTF output from the Output Delivery System (ODS). It asks me to connect to a remote browser. When I try that, I have a connection failure. I am using Base SAS 9.2 software. What am I doing wrong?
One of the joys of statistics is that you can often use different methods to estimate the same quantity. Last week I described how to compute a parametric density estimate for univariate data, and use the parameters estimates to compute the area under the probability density function (PDF). This article
The recent issue of InformationWeek features a Q&A session with Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the Unix operating system. (He collaborated with Dennis Ritchie, of C language fame. Since much of SAS is written in C, I daresay there are a few copies of K&R around here.) One
I just celebrated my 5th anniversary of starting to run. I would have said that I just celebrated my 5th anniversary of being a runner, but I’m not sure I qualify as a “runner,” yet. I do run and I participate in a few races here and there, mostly for
If you create a scatter plot of highly correlated data, you will see little more than a thin cloud of points. Small-scale relationships in the data might be masked by the correlation. For example, Luke Miller recently posted a scatter plot that compares the body temperature of snails when they
Here at SAS Press, we offer a strong, stable publishing team with over 55 years of combined experience. But as a potential author (or even current one) or fan of our press, you might want to get a better feel for the people behind the book. Thus a new feature,
The SIFMA Financial Services Technology Leaders Forum and Expo came to Midtown New York City in mid-June to more fanfare than in the past few years with speakers including Jim Cramer, Art Cashin, Gillian Tett, senior executives from capital markets firms including NYSE Euronext and DTCC, and regulators from the
In a previous article, I discussed random jittering as a technique to reduce overplotting in scatter plots. The example used data that are rounded to the nearest unit, although the idea applies equally well to ordinal data in general. The act of jittering (adding random noise to data) is a
Last week, I attended the International Center for Leadership in Education’s Model Schools Conference in Nashville, TN, where I learned about many forward-thinking education initiatives taking place across the country. My colleagues and I also had the privilege of facilitating a SAS(r) EVAAS for K-12 presentation from two principals at
Jittering. To a statistician, it is more than what happens when you drink too much coffee. Jittering is the act of adding random noise to data in order to prevent overplotting in statistical graphs. Overplotting can occur when a continuous measurement is rounded to some convenient unit. This has the
The area under a density estimate curve gives information about the probability that an event occurs. The simplest density estimate is a histogram, and last week I described a few ways to compute empirical estimates of probabilities from histograms and from the data themselves, including how to construct the empirical
Contributed by Amy Prince, SAS Marketing Operations Same stuff, different year is what comes to mind following our first Power Series session in Minneapolis earlier this month. What’s different this year? The SAS Power Series is a NEW, highly interactive, dynamic few hours designed to address some of the biggest
In my statistical analysis of coupons article, I presented a scatter plot that includes the identity line, y=x. This post describes how to write a general program that uses the SGPLOT procedure in SAS 9.2. By a "general program," I mean that the program produces the result based on the
Have you written a popular SAS Global Forum paper? Have you shared a winning case study with your colleagues? Have you talked about a cool, new feature you found in SAS? Well, share it with the world! SAS Press can help you share your knowledge and expertise worldwide. We’ve published
Contributed by Bob Messier, Senior Director of Business Analytics, SAS Last week I participated in the SAS Power Series event in Minneapolis. It included about 23-30 folks representing a broad range of industries. Analytics was the central topic of the event. What is analytics? How do you get your organization
