A sure-fire SAS Global Forum idea: yours for free

You can still get a paper proposal in for SAS Global Forum 2012. All you need is an idea. And probably some data. And also, some techniques for analyzing that data. Oh, and some conclusions would be helpful as well.

I know: you are a busy person! You might not have the time to come up with all of this on your own before Monday's deadline. In the tradition of tremendous service provided via this blog, I'm here to help.

First, the idea: analyze the physics of the popular game, Angry Birds. Yes, it has been done before, but not by using SAS. So really, as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been done.

How can you collect some data? You need a way to collect measurements of the movement that you see on the screen. Fortunately, there is a free tool that helps you to do that: it's called Tracker. You can play with (er... conduct research on) Angry Birds in your web browser, which makes it much easier to collect measurements.

Now, for the techniques. You can collect the measurements and show them in tables, and maybe a few mathematical formulas, but that could prove to be rather unexciting. You'll be a bigger hit at the conference if you show fancy graphs. If you use ODS Graphics (SGPLOT or the more technical GTL), there is almost nothing that can't show. (Hint: there is a new SAS blog to help with advanced graph techniques!)

Conclusions? I'll leave those to you to make up...I mean, arrive at and thoughtfully present. (Honestly, if I spoon-fed everything to you, I'd have to insist on co-author status.)