In his introductory address, public sector session moderator Thomas Spiller of SAS neatly summed up some of the biggest challenges faced by national governments: dealing with the current economic climate and managing a crisis of confidence within their governments. In his experience, government responses seem to fall in to three
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
Wow, what a couple of days!! I was involved with the SAS Business Forecasting Conference the last two days and I am impressed with all that I saw and learned! F2010 brought 238 people together from 16 countries to share best practices around business forecasting. You have to take a
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
We’re getting ready for the third webinar in the SAS Applying Business Analytics webinar series. This webinar explores how to ensure the success of advanced analytic applications. It’s designed for line-of-business vice presidents, directors, managers and others who want to explore, develop, act and collaborate on making fact-based decisions. So
"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
If you are a SAS/GRAPH user, you may have heard about the new Statistical Graphics ("SG") procedures that are new in SAS 9.2. These procedures are designed to make it easier to produce common statistical charts and plots. You may have assumed that the procedures are only for folks who
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
While reading a datadoodle blog post, Self tracking is business intelligence, I was taken back to my days in the advertising and PR agency world. The blog references Peter Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive that suggests tracking your day (or having your secretary do it) in increments of 15 minutes
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
It is that time of the year again! Rexer Analytics, a data mining consulting firm, is conducting their fourth annual data mining survey. The survey collects preferences, views and interests of data mining professionals (e.g. data miners, statisticians, modelers, analysts, etc.). SAS is not the sponsor of the survey. The
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
I edited my first issue of sascom magazine in the second quarter. Despite her new responsibilities, former Editor-in-Chief Alison Bolen made herself available for my many questions, concerns and frantic messages asking: “Does this sound okay??” It all came together, and we even debuted a new column on business analytics,
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
I mentioned last time that the technique we use to determine topics is a variant of something that has been around for fifty years. In this part I will talk about the intriguing history of this technique, and in the process, I hope to illuminate what we are doing and
As more organizations are realizing greater value tapping into their time series data in new and innovative ways, we are often asked about books we would recommend on time series analysis. I have consulted with some internal experts and wanted to post this list of recommended books on the topic since
SAS and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) have announced the release of the 2010 EIU report, "Rebuilding trust: Next steps for risk management in financial services," sponsored by SAS. The 2010 report includes the results of an online survey - that attracted 346 global respondents, all executives with risk management
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
Curt Monash posted a nice summary of the current and planned offerings that help to make SAS analytics more available "in the database" -- allowing you to analyze your data quickly without having to move it around so much. If you use SAS with Teradata, Netezza, or DB2, much of
Welcome to SAS Training Post, the official blog of SAS Training & Certification! My name is Michele Reister and I am the social media manager for SAS Education. This blog will be a channel to provide you with value-add educational content to help you be a better SAS user. You’ll
This is the topic of an 8-minute video tip from SAS Education. What's great about this tip: not only does it show you how to keep historical versions of reports and data that you create in your projects, but it also provides a nice example of cross-tab reporting in SAS
My friend Tom Reilly of Automatic Forecasting Systems posted this comment on the INFORMS discussion group on LinkedIn: Some use all of the data and some withhold data to find the best forecasting model? Withholding is arbitrary as changing the withhold from x to y means a completely different model
One of my all-time favorite quotes is from John Tukey: “The best part about being a statistician is you get to play in everyone’s backyard."? Statistics (and more broadly, analytics) contributes to and draws from multiple disciplines. There is a unity to analytical methods: The same method used in quantitative
At SAS Global Forum this year, Clark Abrahams, Chief Financial Architect at SAS and author of Fair Lending Compliance and Credit Risk Assessment, offered me a piece of advice that I’m fairly certain is going to change my life. We were getting ready to begin the amazing book drawing for
