Of Tiny Dancers and Warm Weather: Alberta SAS User Groups Wrap-Up

I’m sailing through clear skies at 33,000 feet with a clear mind… and about time, too! I’ve been fighting a nasty bug for about a week and a half now since I spent time in San Francisco for SAS Global Forum. I must admit that winging my way to Alberta was a daunting prospect given the poor state of my health. Fortunately, all worked out for the best.

I’m in a bit of a reflective mood as I stare out of the window. Below me is a massive, still-frozen lake. Behind me lies a province bathed in sunshine and warmth. Ahead of me, my hometown of Toronto… where I understand it’s 17 degrees Celsius and rainy. I find this all to be an elaborate metaphor for the user group meetings I just attended. The warm, happiness and camaraderie I experienced in Alberta were certainly magnified by my travelling companion and guest speaker Peter Eberhardt. The lake below represents this brief pause to collect my thoughts in the midst of what is an undeniably hectic section of my user group schedule. And ahead of me… well, I don’t know what that represents to tell you the truth. Perhaps I’ve stretched this (already thin) metaphor a little too far.

I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in crime on the road than Peter. He and I have become good friends over the years and he’s always at the top of my list for ‘sought after’ guest speakers. His versatility, affability and willingness to go the extra mile for SAS users carries a lot of weight in my book, to say nothing of his deep knowledge of SAS. We also had the opportunity to reminisce about my very first user group road trip over 5 years ago now. Peter was the guest speaker on that particular trip to Saskatoon and Winnipeg, and we had a good chuckle about how much had changed since those early days. Back then, I had checked my luggage: overpacking for a 4 day trip. Peter was kind enough to instruct me on the art of packing light and I wouldn't be caught dead checking anything anymore! I also recall his eyes bugging out of his skull as I paid for everything with the exception of our hotel rooms in cash. My bankroll made me seem like a Vegas high-roller… or a gangster. Either way, not good. I learned a lot from Peter on that trip and our friendship was born. But on to the meetings at hand: the Calgary SAS User Group and the Edmonton SAS User Group. First stop, Calgary.

It’s always such a great pleasure to travel to Calgary. As I told TASS President Art Tabachneck, it’s the home of my favourite hamburger of all time. There’s something about that Alberta beef, straight from the source. More than that, it’s great to catch up with good friends and colleagues. I had a lot of fun eating dinner on a patio bathed in 28 degree sunshine on the famed ‘red mile’ watching the tiny dancers go by… and trying to figure out what they were doing in Calgary! What are tiny dancers? Well, just what you’d imagine. Picture little miniature dolled-up girls with hair in tight buns, lots of eye makeup and lipstick and a variety of decorations for their hair. The game we played over dinner was to figure out what they were doing in town. After a series of agonizing clues – a snatched glimpse of a program here, a barely overheard conversation there – Peter had enough info to determine (with the help of Google) that it was in fact a cheerleading/team dancing convention in town. That blew my theory of why we had seen such increased attendance for the CSUG meeting out of the water… but it was a lot of fun figuring it out. It’s this type of conversation and good fun which really helps define why the user groups are so special. Where else can you bring together customers, vendors and thought leaders in such a fun way?

The meeting itself was a success as well. The agenda had strong representation from a variety of perspectives. Peter covered off on two very popular topics. The first, hash tables, was the talk that most attendees had come to see and Peter certainly didn’t disappoint. He was able to skillfully walk through a mammoth amount of material in very little time, demonstrating the massive performance difference between hash tables and other SAS techniques. He also discussed how to use SAS to create pivot tables in Excel. It’s an undeniable fact that Microsoft products are still prevalent throughout the business world, so this talk really resonated with most. Peter’s casual style and assertion that the techniques he taught would help any SAS user with their positive perception at work won smiles and nods from the room.

On the high performance analytics front, we had a pair of talks which ended up complimenting each other nicely. Ed Swain of Teradata walked through a variety of hardware options and specifications suitable for high performance environments. This flowed perfectly into my own talk and demonstration around SAS Visual Analytics. It’s always a challenge to demonstrate a product ‘live’ A few hiccups notwithstanding, my machine didn't explode and heckling was kept to a minimum… so I would call it a success.

A quick flight to Edmonton later and Peter and I were at it once again, this time for an enormous group of SAS users. As eSUG President Doug Dover and I both commented to the group, this was by far the largest registration and close to the most sizeable attendance the group had ever seen. Kudos to the executive committee for helping pull together an agenda which had everyone in the room interested and willing to come on out!

Edmonton has adopted a full day model for their meetings. The morning features SAS programming talks while the afternoon focuses more closely on interface-style applications such as Enterprise Guide, JMP and Visual Analytics. The afternoon session was a lot of fun as Peter and I conducted back-to-back interactive sessions around EG and VA respectively. Fun, certainly: lively, definitely: vocally exhausting… well, let’s just say that for someone who is certainly fond of his own voice, even I was getting sick of hearing me talk by the end. Having said that I was glad for the chance to showcase VA from both a retail and health perspective and the feedback and questions were great.

Of course, we can’t forget about the morning session. Chris Cullingham of ATCO Power delivered a great talk around billing rates and received almost as much attention for the manner he presented it as the content itself. He used a great alternative to PowerPoint called Prezi; a dynamic, web-based service which allows for really neat customization of talks. In fact, there were several requests for more talks about Presi: that gives you an idea of the impact it made.

George Zhu offered a talk around hash tables and having just seen Peter’s exhaustive dive the day before, it was great to see his thoughts validated through George’s work. Of course, Peter presented once again but this time of the topic of Perl regular expressions and dates. I’ve seen a few Perl talks over the past user group meetings and I’m really intrigued by this programming language. The room clearly was just as fascinated as I was.

One of the challenges facing all user group meetings across the country is finding local presenters willing to stand up and talk. Jared Prins addressed some of the reasons why in his talk which dispelled some of the barriers and laid out a framework for participation. It would seem his talk worked as we had around 10 people offer to give a talk at an upcoming meeting. Thanks for putting some fears to rest and offering some encouragement as well, Jared! Clearly your time as a livestream-featured presenter at SAS Global Forum has given you even more confidence… and the group will certainly benefit from your experience.

All in all, my trip to Alberta was a rousing success. We had great attendance at both meetings and fantastic talks too. You'll be able to find all the talks shortly at the CSUG and eSUG websites. Most importantly, SAS users from a wide range of backgrounds had the opportunity to meet, network and catch up with old friends. As my manager Wally Thiessen recently suggested, the user groups are about so much more than just the presentations: they’re about making new connections, sharing insight with users from other industries, and having some fun too. I would say that we succeeded in every respect over the past few days.

I’ll get home to Toronto today and I’m quickly off again to Burlington for the GHSUG meeting. This, too, promises to be a notable meeting with record registration and a new location to boot! I’ll have more on my experiences and perceptions of that meeting within the next few days. For now, let me sign off by saying thank-you to Alberta for the great meetings. Look forward to catching up with you all in the fall.

Until then…

A Holistic View of SAS: Health User Group

Last Friday, the SAS Health User Group (HUG) took place in Toronto. I am consistently in awe of this amazing group of professionals… perhaps even over-awed to the point of intimidation, if I’m to be honest. It’s amazing for me to listen to talks which bely such a fundamentally strong grasp of statistics, health indicators and SAS programming… and a little daunting when I’m on the agenda as well. It feels a little bit like a young Luke Skywalker charging into battle with the wily Darth Vader before he was ready. I think we all know what the outcome of trying to play with the big boys before ones’ time can be. I was just hoping I would exit the meeting with both of my hands – and my pride – still attached.

Fortunately, this group is as magnanimous and forgiving as it is intelligent. I’ve always been received well despite my technical shortcomings. Perhaps that’s because the agendas are consistently filled with incredibly strong presenters who’s SAS skills easily compensate for mine. This past Friday was to be no exception to this rule.

I led off the meeting with an overview of the new SAS VisualAnalytics product and I did my best to contextualize it for the health practitioners in the room. The talk centered around fictional data of approximately 3 million individuals with multiple data points and around 150 variables. The purpose of the talk was to visually explore the data without excluding or sampling right away with the goal of finding some trends – so matter how obscure – which could be impactful upon the onset of renal disease in an older population of Type II diabetes sufferers. I mentioned to the executive committee over lunch that the topic was actually quite personal for me, as I recently lost a family member quite suddenly due to complications from renal failure. It’s fair to say I wanted to do the topic justice. I began my talk working with billions of correlations in a basic matrix and worked down to some geo-mapping functionality to show the ease and power of the product. Now I’m no expert – not even close! – but I’d like to think that given the amount of questions which followed the talk, there was enough interest generated to have make the topic worthwhile to bring forward. I’m certainly grateful for the patience of the group as I wrestled through some of the terminology and methodology behind the talk.

Our next presenters took the group in a totally new – and welcome – direction. Yuriy Chechulin and Amir Nazerian of the Ministry of Health detailed how they used advanced modeling techniques to identify highcost users of the healthcare system. The objective of this research was to identify ways to ease the burden on the health community in terms of financial investment and time, as well as to help identify triggers and potential solutions to preventing negative health outcomes in the early stages. I really loved this talk. Even as a non-statistician, I could understand the principles behind the modeling techniques used… and I’m always fascinated by the data which helps inform these decisions. Once again the audience proved to be more than engaged with the topic as they peppered both of the presenters with questions about other potential applications for the model and inquiries around some of the exclusions they had made. It was a shame to have to cut off the questions for our break!

Upon our return, we had three tremendous guest speakers. SAS Canada’s own Judy Orr Lawrence walked us through some data cleansing and validation techniques in SAS Enterprise Guide. While more of an ‘ad hoc’ approach to data cleansing, it remained a very intriguing talk… especially for this long-time EG user. I’ll be giving a few EG talks myself in the coming months and I certainly plan on stealing some of her material (with permission, of course) for the talks. I love the way Judy presents: accessible, thorough and with the ability to keep the topic very high-level or dive very deep. As a frequent student in her classes I can tell you with unbiased certainty that anyone would benefit from her tutelage.

Next up, Ellen Maki gave us a deep dive into how she used Bland-Altman bounds to work towards a new understanding of sleep apnea treatment. Utterly fascinating. As I mentioned at the meeting itself, I’ve had sleep consultations several times and I’ve received wildly different diagnoses on each occasion. Ellen’s talk about the potential of taking future tests at one’s home nearly made me weep with joy: those of you who may have had to experience an over-night visit at a sleep clinic can attest that it is not necessarily the most comfortable of experiences to say the least! Even more importantly, Ellen implied that her data indicated quite strong and clear results in her study which is certainly good news for the future diagnosis and treatment of this very harmful sleep disorder. Her presenting style was extremely relaxed and easy, and I do believe that everyone in the room benefitted from her understanding of how she worked through her tests… and hopefully were inspired for their own work as well.

Finally, the incomparable Ruth Croxford concluded the meeting – in a mournfully abbreviated fashion – with a talk on using Perl expressions within her SAS code. I don’t have enough positive things to say about Ruth. As the President of the Executive Committee, she consistently finds great guest speakers (including herself) and is just such a fantastic representative of the healthcare community. I felt horrible that her talk was truncated due to earlier extended question periods, in no small part because I’ve been fascinated by Perl expressions for a long time and wanted to learn as much as I could about them. In her brief time, Ruth did manage to convey a lot of information. She easily moved through an introduction to Perl and also made it very simple to understand just how they could be leveraged in SAS. She certainly had a few people excited to try the procedure which allows you to do so!

All in all, the meeting was extremely successful. We had a record number of registrations – nearly 120 people – and I’m willing to bet we achieved a record for attendance as well. I give all credit to the fantastic guest speakers and the compelling agenda. Thanks once again to all of our guest speakers and to the Executive Committee who made it all happen! If you weren’t able to attend, not to worry: you can always pick up the presentations on the HUG website or connect with us in the SAS Canada Community I do hope we’ll be able to deliver just as strong a meeting when the Health User Group next meets in person on November 15^th, 2013. In the meantime, I’ll be headed to Quebec City for their user group meeting and I’ll be enjoying a trip to San Francisco for SAS Global Forum at month’s end. I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about both meetings, so stay tuned.

Until then…