Just the Stats, Ma'am
The conference who, what, when and where
We had a total of 415 attendees and over 130 papers and posters. Some fun facts are:
- About 51% were first-time attendees.
- All attendees have about 4500 years of combined SAS experience.
- More than 160 attendees (nearly 40%) were volunteers.
- Attendees represented 23 states and 3 Canadian provinces. |
 The Code Clinic Rocked!
The Code Clinic allowed attendees to talk to the experts about particularly troubling programming problems. Many, many of you took advantage of this opportunity! Section Chair Elizabeth Axelrod has calculated some stats (using SAS, of course):
- The Clinic was open for a total of 9.5 hours.
- Each slot was staffed by 2 clinicians, for a total of 19 person/hours of labor.
- 37 clients came to the clinic for a total of 612 minutes (~10.2 hours).
- The average visit length was 16.5 minutes; the median was 10 minutes.
- Each clinician (or pair), saw an average of 2.31 clients.
- The longest visit was 65 minutes.
- The shortest visit was under a minute.
- The Tuesday 2:30 slot served the most clients -- 7.
- The Tuesday 3:30 slot served the fewest clients -- 1 (which gave the clinicians a chance to rest up from the 2:30 rush!).
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| A Plethora of Posters
There was a great group of posters this year, including a number from first-time poster presenters. Section Chairs Louise Hadden and James Shields administered the People's Choice Awards. And the winners were:
- First prize Large Panel: Kathy Fraeman - Get into the Groove with %SYSFUNC: Generalizing SAS Macros with Conditionally Executed Code
- Second prize Large Panel: Ginny Rego and Libing Shi - SAS Chaining Logic in One Step
- First prize Multi Panel: Perry Watts - Generate a Customized Axis Scale with Uneven Intervals in SAS - Automatically
- Second prize Multi Panel: Karin Lapann - Methodologies for Converting Excel Spreadsheets to SAS Datasets
- Most Useful Poster: David Franklin - Merging Data Seven Different Ways
- Most Unique Poster: John Ulicny - Building a Simple Document Server with SAS/Intrnet and Microsoft Word
Thanks to all the poster presenters and those who voted for their favorite posters!
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| PROC Trivia
The game show PROC TRIVIA was a great success -- and lots of fun. Thanks to the judges Michael Tomb, Judy Loren, and Louise Hadden for their wise decisions and to all the contestants, who left with newfound knowledge and some fabulous parting gifts. Our talented and energetic MC, Rick Mitchell, kept things moving and everyone laughing.
Contestants were:
Achal Phani
Annmarie Smith
Arumugam Sutha
Don Evans
Harsha Kotian
Jennifer Rhorer
Jim Horne
Kimball Lewis
Lauren Parlett
Loc Tran
Margaret Burgess
Michael Moll
Michael Tuchman
Tom Zhang
Xiaodong Huang
Xiuhua Chen
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How About those Pirates!
 Some of us took advantage of the offer to attend the Pirates game on Monday evening. It wasn't exactly a World Series event, but it was fun to be at the beautiful PNC Park and take part in America's pastime. At least there was one home run so we got to see some flashy fireworks. And since we were invited to send text messages to the scoreboard, we all got to see the message "NESUG says Go BUCS!." NESUG finally got our 15 seconds of fame!!
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Help Us Make NESUG 2009 Even Better!
Don't forget to fill out your conference evaluation (emailed to attendees on 9/24). We really do read these comments and use them to make each conference better.
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