This morning Rick Wicklin announced his (hostile?, nah...) takeover of the technical blog space at SAS. I'll admit that it took me by surprise when I awoke in Siberia this morning. It's so cold here; I can't feel my fingers as I type. This is probably a punishment for the
Editor's Note: This article was an April Fool's prank from 2011. The entire article is fake. Today, SAS, the leader in business analytics announces significant changes to two popular SAS blogs, The DO Loop (written by Rick Wicklin) and The SAS Dummy (previously written by Chris Hemedinger). The two blogs
Rick is another guy I've gotten to know through the SAS users group community, mainly through mutual work with the NorthEast SAS Users Group (NESUG), where's held various leadership positions, including that of conference chair. I wish I had his stamina and motivation. Wait until you find out what he
I've had the pleasure of knowing Andy Kuligowski for years through our mutual work with local and regional SAS users groups. He's a huge hockey fan, and he's not afraid of rats, snakes or alligators (more about that later). His sense of humor is also famous. Read on to learn
"Twitter, thou art nought but data." So sayeth the SAS programmer. Many data analysts now recognize Twitter for what it is: a tremendous source of data covering almost any topic, from Justin Bieber's hair to political uprisings to technical conferences to company brands. SAS offers sophisticated solutions to harness this
In SAS 9.2, internal accounts can be created and utilized within the metadata and then do not require host (or domain) accounts defined elsewhere. By default, the sasadm@saspw is one such internal account. Unless you specifically declare an exception, the server-level policies for routine password resetting and locking (such as
I’m happy to announce that Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition by seasoned SAS Press author Frederick Pratter will be available in June! Frederick has worked tirelessly to update the book, which has substantial changes from the second edition. In Frederick’s words, “practically everything has changed since the
This week, I posted the 100th article to The DO Loop. To celebrate, I'm going to analyze the content of my first 100 articles. In December 2010, I compiled a list of The DO Loop's most-read posts, so I won't repeat that exercise. Instead, I thought it would be interesting
Tomorrow, we welcome the newest member of the SAS Press Team, Aimee Rodriguez. Aimee is joining our team to provide one-on-one marketing support for our authors and books. Aimee has over 10 years of experience in publishing and marketing, including marketing and promotions at Algonquin Books, event planning and promotions,
Let’s start with a quiz. Which of the following is the Programmer’s Rule # 1? 1. Expert knowledge of multiple languages, like SAS and Java 2. Talent to maneuver with complex algorithms 3. Innate ability to draw flowcharts 4. None of the above Dear reader, as a savvy programmer, you
SAS Global Forum appreciates the support of its sponsors. I asked a Red Hat representative some questions so that we could get to know this valued Gold sponsor better. 1. What initiatives or goals are you trying to achieve by partnering with SAS? To help SAS and its customers exploit
After talking about SAS products and development roadmaps with industry experts at the SAS Analysts Conference in Steamboat Springs earlier this month and now as we're preparing for SAS Global Forum next week, I have to say how proud I am of the SAS Research and Development and Product Management
In a previous post, I described how to compute means and standard errors for data that I want to rank. The example data (which are available for download) are mean daily delays for 20 US airlines in 2007. The previous post carried out steps 1 and 2 of the method
Lurkers have earned a bad rep. They are the lepers in the social media community… outsiders who don’t participate…they lurk in the shadows quietly consuming content but, never contributing, never sharing. They are the plague in the social media world. Who needs that, right? Well…everyone…actually. In a recent discussion at
Take your pick. The NCAA men’s final championship game, the Academy of Country Music Awards, and SAS Global Forum 2011 all sweep in early next week—representing the pinnacle of their respective organizations. Rather than stay on the sidelines, I’m sure that many of you will actively participate in some of
Many SAS users love "undocumented features" within SAS software that they have found or heard about. Sometimes they can be really useful, and the fact that they are undocumented adds to the mystique. Some users have written entire conference papers on the subject. After 35 years of evolution, SAS contains
SAS Global Forum appreciates the support of its sponsors. I asked a Teradata representative some questions so that we could get to know this valued Premier sponsor better. 1. Can you provide some background information on the Teradata Corporation? Teradata is the world’s largest company focused solely on raising intelligence
Recently, my friend and colleague Will Waugh published Lead Management Automation – How We Did It and What we Learned, the first in this series of Lead Management Automation posts. While Will focused on outlining the digital marketing challenges we faced at SAS, I focused on solving those challenges. Here
When you create a character matrix in SAS/IML software, the initial values determine the number of characters that can fit into any element of the matrix. For example, the following statements define a 1x3 character matrix: proc iml; m = {"Low" "Med" "High"}; After the matrix is defined, at most
I recently posted an article about representing uncertainty in rankings on the blog of the ASA Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts (SSPA). The posting discusses the importance of including confidence intervals or other indicators of uncertainty when you display rankings. Today's article complements the SSPA post by showing how
For two days in Early March (March 7-8), we hosted forty-eight of the industry’s most influential analysts in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for SAS’ annual analyst conference. Collectively, the analysts generated more than 2,000 tweets – the bulk of which were created in a single day – the day our executive
One of the first things many of us do in the "monitoring and listening" phase of social media engagement is to sign up for Google Alerts. After you sign up for those alerts, one of the things to watch out for are scraper blogs. These sites copy and paste (or
I believe I would have interviewed AnnMaria De Mars even if you hadn't sent me scads of e-mails and tweets suggesting her as a perfect candidate for the SAS Rock Stars series. I "met" AnnMaria when I started looking for SAS users on Twitter – nearly three years ago while
I recently blogged about how to eliminate a macro loop in favor of using SAS/IML language statements. The purpose of the program was to extract N 3x3 matrices from a big 3Nx3 matrix. The main portion of my PROC IML program looked something like this: proc iml; ... do i=0
Marje Fecht has been an active SAS User and SAS Conference participant and leader for over 30 years. This year, she is the Section Chair for the brand new Enterprise Guide Section and for the Travel, Hospitality, and Entertainment section. She has provided some great highlights on these sections.. Do
It should come as no surprise that one of the topics of great interest to the customer intelligence community is marketing measurement. And like anything, the better the measurement, the better the potential impact for management. So, to address the topic of marketing measurement for our recent Webinar with the
Influence is something we all want to attain within our respective markets, but questions often arise about what makes someone an influencer: How do you identify influencers in your industry? How influential are they really? How do they influence their audience? Where does their influence begin and end? How can
Recently, I was waiting at a stoplight listening to an author interview on NPR. They were talking with Joshua Foer, a journalist who, as part of a feature he was writing, decided to take on the challenge of the United States Memory Championship event and ended up winning. He’s written
Seth Godin, bald. Mitch Joel, bald. Greg Verdino, bald. Stacey Alexander, bald. Yes, you heard that right. Former SAS intern, Stacey Alexander, who blogged here frequently last summer, is shaving her head. But no, she's not really doing it to join the bald social media guru club. Instead, she's doing
