NOTE: SGF 2013 Obsession #sasgf13

I think I’m becoming a bit obsessive about SAS Global Forum 2013, to be hosted by San Francisco. I mentioned a couple of months back how the sound of The Flower Pot Men had been floating around my head – Let’s Go To San Francisco. I realised last night…

SAS graphs for presidential elections

In the U.S. we have a presidential election every 4 years – and as luck would have it, 2012 is an election year! I see a lot of election maps & graphs in the news, and I’m always subconsciously critiquing them in my mind and thinking to myself, …

Cleaner OLAP cube physical folder structures

Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid’s small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my “digital pack-rat” issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a projec…

Constructing common covariance structures

I recently encountered a SUGI30 paper by Chuck Kincaid entitled “Guidelines for Selecting the Covariance Structure in Mixed Model Analysis.” I think Kincaid does a good job of describing some common covariance structures that are used in mixed models. One of the many uses for SAS/IML is as a language […]

Debugging With Six Sigma Ishikawa

Back in September 2009 (that seems so long ago!) I wrote an article on problem solving using the 5 Whys technique. Some correspondents suggested that 5 Whys was a trivial/obvious technique, but they were missing the point somewhat – sometim…