Martha Britton is a mother of three children, a wife, full-time employee and now a SAS certified professional. But getting that last title wasn’t easy. It all started earlier this year when Britton took the SAS Base Certification Programmer exam and …
Category: SAS
Using a regular expression to validate a SAS variable name
Regular expressions provide a powerful method to find patterns in a string of text. However, the syntax for regular expressions is somewhat cryptic and difficult to devise. This is why, by my reckoning, approximately 97% of the regular expressions used in code today were copied and pasted from somewhere else. […]
NOTE: SAS Software is Great, But …
It can be quite disconcerting when you unexpectedly find that something (or somebody) with which (whom) you’ve become very familiar over the years has suddenly changed significantly. I can’t even remember why I was recently looking for information ab…
Is there bias in Facebook graphs?
Facebook has millions of users, and therefore when people share an interesting graph on Facebook it can “go viral” and millions of people might see it. Some of the graphs are obviously a bit biased – especially ones that are trying to sway your opi…
NOTE: BI Testing
I recently spotted a valuable posting from SAS’s Angela Hall on her Real BI for Real Users blog. I hesitate to suggest it was valuable because that implies her other posts are of less value! Not true, but this particular article was titled Testing reco…
10 career tips for analytics professionals
We all strive to be the best in our field. I’m always looking for unique and fun ways to engage people through our social media channels at SAS. But what does it take to grow in the field of analytics? I reached out to the speakers and sponsors of th…
Comparing data set schemas in SAS
The project that I’m currently working on requires several input data tables, and those tables must have a specific schema. That is, each input table must contain columns of a specific name, type, and length in order for the rest of the system to function correctly. The schema requirements aren’t […]
The Statistical Sleuth (second edition) in R
For those of you who teach, or are interested in seeing an illustrated series of analyses, there is a new compendium of files to help describe how to fit models for the extended case studies in the Second Edition of the Statistical Sleuth: A Course in…