February 2010

Dear Readers,

After a busy start of the new year, with lots of best wishes to all of you, I would like to take 10 minutes of your time, to share the latest academic news with you. Within this edition you can find information on SAS certification, use of R inside SAS, the upcoming maintenance release, the easy display of graphical results, the upcoming SAS events, new publications and indispensible for students : the new e-learning modules.

Enjoy reading,
Lieve.

SAS Certification - A World of Opportunity!

Certification Magazine’s 2009 salary survey revealed a 9% increase in average salaries compared to 2008. They conclude that “IT has been widely recognized as a growth industry – even in this climate.” They also discovered that, “a full 96% of respondents from the top five countries with the highest salaries said they were certified.”

By the close of 2009, a total of 26,296 SAS credentials had been awarded. The graph below shows the global dispersion of SAS credential holders.

Congratulations to our latest SAS Certified credential holders!

Are you not yet part of them, join then one of the SAS Certification exams. The next upcoming exams are February 23 in Gent and March 26 in Tervuren.

More information on SAS Certification on SAS Certification – A World of Opportunity!

Summer of SAS

The successful program in which 30 young potentials are trained during 1 month to become a SAS expert in data warehousing, analytics or business intelligence will again take place in August.  Submissions are open on www.summer-of-sas.be. You will receive soon more material to promote this training amongst your students.

Using R inside SAS

Complete documentation for the R language interface available in SAS/IML Studio 3.2 is available for downloading.

9.2 Maintenance Release 1 – 2 or 3?

In fall 2009, the second maintenance for SAS 9.2 was released to users. While primarily a vehicle for fixes, this release also provides production versions of the following SAS/STAT procedures, which were released as experimental in the original 9.2 release: MCMC, SEQTEST and SEQDESIGN.  The documentation for these procedures has also been updated, and it can be obtained from the SAS/STAT documentation product page. Maintenance release 3 is planned for May 2010.

Attractive graphics in SAS/STAT ?
Yes, you can !

In the series of SAS technical presentations, you can attend now the On-Demand Webinar  “Getting Started with ODS Statistical Graphics in SAS® 9.2”  It will give you the essentials you need to begin using ODS Graphics in SAS 9.2. More in particular, you will discover how to

• Create graphs that you can conveniently include in documents and presentations.
• Control the content and appearance of graphs with options and styles.
• Enhance graphs with the ODS Graphics Editor.

Upcoming Events

		SAS Global Forum, April 11-14, 2010, Seattle. More information on www.sasglobalforum.org
		Spicing up Analytics, April 22, Tervuren. Agenda available soon on www.sas.com/belux/events
		F2010 Business Forecasting Conference , June 7-8, Cary. Details on F2010 here!
		Data Mining Conference , October 25- 26 , Las Vegas. Read more on M2009 Web site

9.2 New E-learning material available

Under the roof of the campus license, all academic staff and students can take advantage of the latest e-learning techniques. The material will be shipped to you, and it strongly recommended to install it on a webserver so that all people who want to get started with SAS, improve their competencies or prepare for the SAS Certification exam can take benefit from it.
Some quotes of users:

1. “The visual design and interactivity made taking the course enjoyable and kept me engaged.”  
2. “Excellent use of links to the reference documents. You can print the Summary for use as a study guide.”  
3. “The e-Course does a good job of balancing subject material, knowledge checks, demonstrations”

SAS Publishing

Via the SAS Deskcopy program, you can order yearly 2 publications for free on http://support.sas.com/publishing/survey/evalcopy_07.html. Use this to discover the latest SAS publications.

		Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Miner 6.1 Introduces the core functionality of SAS Enterprise Miner 6.1 and shows how to perform basic data-mining tasks. Provides step-by-step examples that create a complete process-flow diagram, including graphic results.
		Elementary Statistics Using SAS The first section of the book explains the basics of SAS data sets and shows how to use SAS for descriptive statistics and graphs. The second section discusses fundamental statistical concepts, including normality and hypothesis testing. The remaining sections of the book show analyses for comparing two groups, comparing multiple groups, fitting regression equations, and exploring contingency tables.
		Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean Anyone whose work involves quality and productivity improvement or process optimization efforts will benefit from Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean. The book is organized around a series of six case studies that present complete examples of real-life project situations. These case studies illustrate step-by-step how to use JMP to complete the projects, with emphasis on its visualization capabilities.
		The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2 Whether you are using SAS Enterprise Guide for the first time or transitioning to the newest release, this is the book for you! With The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2, award-winning authors Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche help you quickly become productive in the SAS Enterprise Guide point-and-click environment. Let me know when this book is available

Do you want to share information with the SAS academic community? Send your topic to lieve.goedhuys@sas.com

Contact SAS: academic@sbx.sas.com or +32 2 766 07 00
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