I’m trying to pull my thoughts together after a lightning quick tour through the province of Québec. It truly was an epic voyage… but I’m fortunate I had a fantastic travelling companion with me for the duration: a man who needs no intro…
Analytics 2012: From big data to big buffets
The Analytics conference wrapped up another successful year. One of the last things I did in Las Vegas was decompress with some colleagues at the Bacchanal buffet at Caesar’s Palace. It is, in a word, Bacchanal. Now back to the meat of the conference…
NOTE: Date Increments (INTNX and INTCK)
If you’re an experienced SAS practitioner you’ll be familiar with the INTNX (and INTCK) function. INTNX takes date, time, and datetime values and increments (or decrements) them by a specified interval, e.g. hours, weeks or quarters. If you’re not fami…
3 good reasons to upgrade to SAS 9.3
If you’re like me, you hate all those pop-ups you get suggesting (or sometimes forcing) that you install an upgrade such as Windows, Java, browsers, phone apps, etc, etc. And quite often they don’t convince you why you’d want to upgrade (will life be…
That distribution is quite PERT!
There are a lot of useful probability distributions that are not featured in standard statistical textbooks. Some of them have distinctive names. In the past year I have had contact with SAS customers who use the Tweedie distribution, the slash distribution, and the PERT distribution. Often these distributions are used […]
Tony Barr and the Early History of SAS
SAS historians (not all SAS users!) know Anthony James Barr (aka Tony Barr or Jim Barr) was the designer and implementor of SAS language (1966-1979) and the founding CEO of SAS Institute (1976-1979). In this picture was Tony Barr in the first SUGI (January 26-28, 1976, Kissimmee, FL), taken by the first SUGI chair Julian […]