Dear Reader,

Regular readers of the SAS Training Report may recall that my Aunt Teresa is a notoriously bad driver. Thankfully, she’s fully aware of this shortcoming and is constantly asking family and friends to drive her places. On the rare occasions when she does need to take to the road, though, my uncle requires her to follow The Teresa Rules, a set of guidelines designed to minimize the risk she poses to herself and others when she ventures out on her own.

Rule #3: "Only drive forward," enacted after two separate accidents while backing up was undoubtedly on her mind the day she noticed a series of orange barrels lining a stretch of road by her home. What my aunt failed to notice, though, was the construction worker in the fluorescent yellow vest holding a stop sign meant to alert her to the road resurfacing ahead.

Oblivious to the workers sprinting after her car and yelling for her to stop, it never dawned on Aunt Teresa that she might be the cause of the commotion. It was only after she reached the end of the barrel-lined corridor, nearly running into a roller smoothing a patch of newly laid asphalt, that she realized her mistake.

When the out-of-breath and perturbed workers caught up to my aunt, they insisted that she back her car down the corridor and leave the area immediately. "I can't back up," was Aunt Teresa's response. "My husband won't let me."

After explaining the difficulty she had going in reverse, how her brain somehow couldn't comprehend how steering right made the front of the car go left, the workers took pity. The conversation concluded with my aunt moving into the passenger's seat and one of the workers backing her car down the corridor, returning her to a safe stretch of road.

Going in reverse was simply beyond my aunt’s expertise. She needed someone with the skills to guide her to a place she couldn’t get to on her own. Our Business Knowledge Series (BKS) offers a similar helping hand. The program is a unique collaborative initiative between SAS and a global network of industry experts who deliver the most current information on business practices, concepts, methodology and techniques to help you successfully navigate your journey.

SAS debuts two new courses in 2012. The first, Introduction to Causal Inference in Real-World Data: Applications for Finance, Telecommunications, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, and the Public Sector, helps individuals test whether the results of a program can be attributed to a given cause. It’s the perfect course for data analysts or statisticians who find the simple method of multiple linear regression inadequate. The course is presented by either Howard S. Friedman, Ph.D., health economist for the United Nations, or Paul Thurman, management consultant and professor, Columbia University.

The second course, Data Mining: Principles and Best Practices, teaches individuals how to discover useful patterns from their data and provides practical advice on how to set up experiments and interpret results. This course is presented by either presented by John Elder or Gerhard Pilcher, President and Senior Scientist, respectively, at Elder Research Inc.

At SAS Education we don't believe in going in reverse. Let us help you move beyond your expertise with these new BKS courses.

Oh, and remind me to tell you the story about Aunt Teresa's parallel parking sometime.

Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Training Report