This week I received an urgent text message from a good friend and former colleague in the consulting business: Mike, I am down 24 pages in your book and [besmirching my trousers]. Is there no hope for consultants like me? My response was to not let the book ruin a
I've completed my first day of teaching a two-day course about SAS Enterprise Guide. I'm in Sydney, Australia...but my biological clock is still tuned into Cary, North Carolina time. I woke up at 1 a.m. today and even though I tried to convince my body that it was still time
An alarming percentage of major software implementations fail to be delivered on time, on budget, or even at all. Implementations of new forecasting software, or of new forecasting processes, are not immune from this legacy of failure. Why does this happen, and is there anything we can do about it?
I received this offer in the post the other day: "University apparel just for you, featuring the name HEMEDINGER!" Yes, the offer has it correct. This would be just for me, because I can't think of anyone else who might order it. I regret that I didn't receive the offer
There is a long running debate among forecasting professionals, on whether to use Forecast or Actual in the denominator of your percentage error calculations. The Winter 2009 issue of Foresight had an article by Kesten Green and Len Tashman, reporting on a survey (of the International Institute of Forecasters discussion
Art Carpenter offers tremendous advice to SAS programmers who want to maximize their job security: make your programs impossible for others to read and understand. In his published papers, Art (in his tongue-in-cheek manner) presents practical examples for how to accomplish this. I'm afraid that with our new code formatter
The Summer 2010 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: For so many years, we forecasters have developed and refined models for demand forecasts – forecasts for product and item sales, orders, shipments – without paying adequate attention to the details of how these forecasts
Better forecasting can, of course, help address many business problems. We want to believe that more accurate forecasts are always possible. “If only,” management bemoans, “if only we had bigger computers, more sophisticated software, more skilled forecast analysts – or if the analysts we have just worked harder!” Unfortunately, there
Supporting SAS Global Forum is a year-round effort, but for me, the opening of the Call for Papers is basically the start of the upcoming conference. The section chairs have been selected, and they’ve posted what they are looking for in their sections. You’ll need to submit your abstract and
Have you ever inherited a SAS program from a "gifted" SAS programmer? By "gifted", I mean a person who regards line feeds and white space as a waste of precious bytes, who knows that his program is worth the tremendous effort it might take to read and understand it, as
You can use SAS Enterprise Guide to automate most aspects of queries, analytics, and reporting -- including sending e-mail notifications with the results. In this blog post, I'll show you how you can send these results and use Gmail as your e-mail provider. First, some background: SAS Enterprise Guide provides
I'm a computer geek -- much more comfortable behind a keyboard than in front of a camera. But I was glad to put on a nice shirt and visit the SAS video studio so that I could record this message for SAS customers: how does SAS R&D work to support
Just as we all eagerly awaited announcement of the $1 million prize winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off(R), every forecasting software vendor has endured the "bake-off" hosted by organizations in the market for new forecasting software. Software selection teams utilize a bake-off to help evaluate competing vendors. Vendors are given a
As I mentioned in a recent post, I've just completed reading Dear Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. I acquired a copy of Tim's book at the SAS Professionals Convention, and I was fortunate enough to meet Tim in person and have him sign the book. He impressed me as very
The F2010 Business Forecasting Conference wrapped up on June 8. Chaired by Tim Rey of Dow Chemical and Jerry Oglesby of SAS, this was another strong event, bringing together 248 forecasters from business, government, and academics, representing 27 states and 11 countries. It was also an opportunity for all to
I spent last week in the UK for the SAS Professionals Convention. It was my first time visiting the UK. If my experience is any indication, then the area (just outside of London) is constantly warm and very bright. However, I did visit very near the summer solstice and I'm
I'm at the SAS Professionals Convention in Marlow, UK, where over 100 SAS users participated in one of the largest SAS certification events ever held. Also present at the event: a mother duck working to achieve a milestone of her own, by hatching a family of ducklings. According to the
~Contributed by Steve Benfield, Senior Director of Corporate Communications ~ Need a translation? Here you go: What In The World Is Wrong With “SGF?” Make sense now? Surely I don’t need to spell out SGF for an audience of SAS users, do I? Well, a quick Google search will tell
If you send me an e-mail message next week, this is what you can expect in return. Thanks for your e-mail. I'm attending the SAS Professionals Convention in Marlow, UK. That's right, I'm in Merry Old England, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Ginger Spice, and Doctor Who.
What do you do when you and your spouse are both SAS users, but one of you likes to point-and-click and the other really likes to write SAS programs? Is it possible to share a SAS environment, or are these irreconcilable differences that can lead only to a nasty custody
I am pleased to announce publication of The Business Forecasting Deal: Exposing Myths, Eliminating Bad Practices, Providing Practical Solutions, available now in a convenient carry-everywhere size (approx 6” x 9” x 1”), or for download to your Kindle. Table of contents, sample sections (including the Prologue, Forewords by Tom Wallace
I'm using this post to share links to several SAS-related blogs created by others. This is me acting generous by sharing -- it's not me acting lazy by shirking an original post. Really. Datum Reparo! AnnMaria waves her SAS Enterprise Guide magic wand, utters a few (magic?) words, and makes
"Less Wrong" is the name of the blog where I found this layman's explanation of Bayes' Theorem. As I've pointed out before, I'm not a statistician. But I can comprehend basic statistical explanations such as the explanation of the Monty Hall problem. Understanding the concepts and being able to apply
I've known Jim Cox for a long time. He's the SAS R&D manager for SAS Text Miner, and a gifted singer. We almost never talk about work stuff, because Jim is waaaaay too smart for me. That's why I was so pleased to discover Jim's series of blog entries about
Like any good SAS professional, I subscribe to the SAS Samples RSS feed. The other day I found this sample that shows how to create a PDF report about the contents of a SAS Information Map. It's a nice example: it shows how to use the INFOMAPS engine and ODS
As Shane reveals on his blog, your SAS session is equipped to read data that are encoded for all types of machine architectures and locales. ASCII, EBCDIC, 32- or 64-bit, English, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew: the list goes on and on. SAS accomplishes this by using a feature called Cross-Environment Data
Susan and Lora share all of the details on the OpenMic blog. (You can also see it on the SAS Publishing Facebook page.) I was pleased to have reviewed the book for technical content before it was published. As usual, Susan and Lora did a great job; they know what
Why does this SAS program produce an error? proc means data=sashelp.cars mean median min max; by origin; run; It's because SASHELP.CARS is a SAS data set, and SAS data sets observations are stored and processed sequentially, and a BY group operation requires that the observations are already grouped and sorted
Was it the economy? the timing? the location? or the brilliant and good looking Forum panel? That will be for history (or you) to decide. What we do know is that is that the Institute of Business Forecasting’s Best Practices Conference in San Francisco, April 28-30, drew a large and
SAS catalogs have been around for a long time. Not quite as long as the Sears or L.L. Bean catalogs, but SAS customers have used catalogs to store and retrieve content for many years. A SAS catalog is a special type of SAS file that acts as a container, like
