Unusual SAS Error Message

Today I encountered the following error messages in SAS after creating a table using SQL based on a SASHelp table:

ERROR: Floating Point Zero Divide.
ERROR: Termination due to Floating Point Exception

This strange set of errors is not well documented and, as I eventually found out, has nothing to do with my original query:

proc sql;
create table _test_ as
select * from sashelp.vtable
where upcase(libname)="SPECIFIC_LIBNAME"
;
quit;

Where "SPECIFIC_LIBNAME" was a macro variable containing the libname I wanted information about.

The solution to this problem was to clear a particular library that consisted only of views. This library's members were generated prior to the above step, and may have somehow contributed to the problem within the SASHelp metadata. In general, it may be a good practice to review the libraries and their sizes when encountering problems with the SASHelp library, which contains a great deal of metadata on SAS libraries.

For this set of errors, however, this solution will probably not always work. It would appear that the problem is related to extensions of SAS that are dependent on external sources. In this case, it may have been the SQL procedure. This does seem strange, since SQL is a widely-used standard. Clearing the previously-created library may have cleared up an exception caused by a large amount of data in the SASHelp table that was not accounted for in the manner in which SAS implemented the SQL standard or the proprietary extensions of it.

If you encounter this error, please let me know! Especially if you know how to fix it!

Articles and Discussions Regarding these Errors:

• Error Query
• PROC VARIOGRAM
• Integer divide by zero discussion
• Log Interpretation Help!
• Integer divide by zero question
• UCLA FAQ

What About Gas Prices?

Recently there's been a lot of hubbub about gas prices. While high, gas prices are not as high as many other things people buy, especially some things people buy on a daily basis, like coffee. For my family, I can demonstrate that the cost of gas is not as big a concern and not as big a budget item. Using Mint.com, my credit and debit cards, my wife's credit and debit cards, and many other financial accounts are linked and the transactions pooled together and categorized. Using this tool, I graphed the entire year of spending in 2010 in seconds:



Note: "Everything Else" includes Gifts and Donations, Health and Fitness, Uncategorized (cash and some checks), Travel, Business Services, Personal Care, Pets, Entertainment, and Fees and Charges. I also separated "Gas and Fuel" from "Auto and Transport" to demonstrate my point. What's left in in "Auto and Transport" includes Parking, Services and Parts, Auto Insurance, and "Other" (state transportation fees). Restaurants, coffee shops, and alcohol were included in Food and Dining, but I split those out into "Restaurants, etc.".

Our family probably does not spend like other families. We're generally fiscally conservative. We do like to buy good, healthy, and (when we can) local food, so our food prices are high. We don't splurge on electronics, entertainment, fancy phone or cable services, or personal care. We also minimize driving, which keeps auto costs lower. Both our drives to work are within 15 minutes. On the other hand we have a lot of educational debt. Even so, that's still a relatively small percentage of expenses. It should be no surprise that the top of the list is housing. That's probably true for just about anyone at any income level.

So what concerns me more? The cost of fuel or something else? Even as the cost of gas has risen, I'm not as concerned as I am about the cost of food, which is partly related to the cost of gas. However, there are more insidious factors in the cost of food: Wall Street.

As quoted by BoingBoing author Mark Frauenfelder, Frederick Kaufman wrote, in an article titled How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis:

[T]he boom in new speculative opportunities in global grain, edible oil, and livestock markets has created a vicious cycle. The more the price of food commodities increases, the more money pours into the sector, and the higher prices rise. Indeed, from 2003 to 2008, the volume of index fund speculation increased by 1,900 percent. "What we are experiencing is a demand shock coming from a new category of participant in the commodities futures markets," hedge fund Michael Masters testified before Congress in the midst of the 2008 food crisis.

The result of Wall Street's venture into grain and feed and livestock has been a shock to the global food production and delivery system. Not only does the world's food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real grain, but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grain futures. The result: Imaginary wheat dominates the price of real wheat, as speculators (traditionally one-fifth of the market) now outnumber bona-fide hedgers four-to-one.

Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain -- the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below. Near the bottom toils the farmer. For him, the rising price of grain should have been a windfall, but speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain -- from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel. At the very bottom lies the consumer. The average American, who spends roughly 8 to 12 percent of her weekly paycheck on food, did not immediately feel the crunch of rising costs. But for the roughly 2-billion people across the world who spend more than 50 percent of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world's "food insecure" to a peak of 1 billion -- a number never seen before.

As you can see in my spending graph, "Food and Dining" consumes 13% of our budget, higher than the quoted 8-12%. This category originally included restaurants, coffee shops, and alcohol, which I moved into "Restaurants, etc.", and was at 18.5% of spending. With these items removed, it seems much more reasonable, but still high. About 4 times higher than gas prices!

Given that our expenditure is already higher than the estimate in the article, and that food prices are likely to increase due to this investment scheme as well as increased transportation costs due to gas prices, I am much more concerned about the cost of food. Occasionally I joke that my son eats so much I might as well buy a farm to feed him, and that's not that far from the truth. We do partake in local farmer's markets and a community farm, but even so, those prices will probably be affected too.

So take a look at your own expenses and critically examine what's really costly. And once you figure that out, take action to reduce the costs however you can. For me, I'll chose to vote for politicians who push for financial reform and continue to buy as much local, organic food as I can.

Sound Advice for LinkedIn

The Job Doc has some good advice for how to behave on LinkedIn:

Avoid these 4 mistakes with LinkedIn

1) Never inviting anyone.

Hmm, this one's tempting. No one likes rejection; it forces you to relive high school. ... Last week, I invited 20 people to LinkedIn. Most accepted, a few ignored me. Nothing terrible happened.

2) Bad timing.

... Timing matters. Are your LinkedIn invitations too late, or too early? "Don't invite within two hours of meeting," says Rod Hughes, Director of Communications, Oxford Communications. "I typically wait till the next day," advises Rod. "Anything sooner seems stalker-esque."

3) Inviting everyone.

... "You need a policy," says Thom Singer, author of several networking books. "My policy," says Thom, "is The Coffee, Meal or Beer Rule, which means not accepting links unless I've had a real conversation."

4) Bad invitation.

At LinkedIn, the default invite is, "I'd like to add you to my professional network." But that's robotic. ... Tip: For better results, deliver a better invitation.

How do you go about inviting people into your network? Could you improve the way you go about it? I know I've used the default invitation far too often: usually because I'm in a hurry. Even a more personal default would be better than the LinkedIn default.

LinkedIn isn't Facebook either, where you can invite anyone on a whim. I've received a number of unwanted or unexpected invitations, some of which I probably should not have accepted given the "coffee, meal, or bear" rule. Those contacts I put in a "monitor" category, since I do not know these people very well and I'm not sure I want the association. Should their behavior be questionable, I remove the association with the contact.

What about you? How do you go about adding contacts?

Recipe Database

I've been working on a recipe database for my wife, to help her plan meals by being able to easily peruse recipes (especially favorite recipes) and associate those recipes with days and meals. I also wanted to be able to easily add recipes, ingredients, and grocery items. Here is the most recent relationship view of the database:



Each recipe is associated with a list of directions and a list of ingredients. Since ingredients are variations on specific items, they are not distinct grocery list items. For example, one recipe may call for 2 tomatoes and another may call for 3 tomatoes, and each would be a separate ingredient, but only one grocery item with a combined total of 5 units. Grocery items also have alternatives in a self-referential link (ALT_GROC_ID), which would be appropriate for recipes with "or"s in the ingredient list or legitimate alternatives (e.g., sea salt for salt).

Then there are the weekly plans, called "Lists". I realized this term may cause some confusion between grocery lists and plans, so I may change it in the future. For now, I'm focusing on completing the functionality of the database and not improvements to the delivery. Each list is associated with a beginning and end date ("from" and "thru" on the Lists table). Each list has several detail lines in the Lists_detail table that associates days with meals for the days between the beginning and end dates, inclusively. Each meal is then related to a recipe.

Currently the database exists in a Microsoft Access database, and eventually I would like to port it over to SQLite or something similar, with HTML forms. For now, there are several Access forms for data entry, and the initial "Start" form that opens with the database provides access to many of those forms.



The top section of buttons appends new plans to the Lists table with different start dates. For a typical week, a user might start planning on Saturday for the next week Sunday - Saturday and the following week Sunday - Saturday, and would thus start two new lists using the Tomorrow and "Week from Tomorrow" buttons. The two new lists would be associated with today's date, which is displayed in the upper right hand corner.

Once the new lists are initiated, the user can open them by using the "Today's Plans" button in the "Open..." section. The user can also open recipes for viewing and the grocery list based on today's plans. Eventually I'm going to switch the grocery list from a view-only report to a form based on an append query, which would keep track of the lists through time and build an inventory of the kitchen. (This is where the confusion with "lists" would come in to play.) Also from the start form, the user can also add or edit recipes, add or edit grocery items, or delete plans.

The main function of the database is to help the user plan for a week or two of meals by associating days and meals with recipes and ultimately generating a list of grocery items to use while shopping. Here is the plan entry form (click for a larger view) that opens when the "Today's Plans" button is used:



The list date range is the first section, with arrows allowing the user to switch lists. The navigable lists depends on how the user opened the form based on the buttons in the start form. The user then uses the drop-down boxes to select days and meals. Next, the user can use the bottom part of the form to look up recipes. Say the user wants a rice dish, so the user clicks on the binoculars and searches the Name field for "rice". Currently there are fields for descriptions, authors, origins, and URLs for recipes, which could also be added to the form to help the user find a particular recipe.

The ingredients and directions are listed to help the user figure out what would be appropriate to prepare for any given day's plan. Once the recipe is selected, the user enters the recipe ID next to the meal. Alternatively, the user can enter something other than a recipe for a meal, for example, "go out to eat with friends" or "order pizza". Once the weekly plan(s) are complete, the user can return to the start form and open the grocery list report, which is organized by the location the items are found in the store, like produce, meats, aisles, etc.:



There is a lot of work still to do. As I mentioned, I have to figure out how to append the grocery lists to a list table to maintain a history. Then, I need to enter a lot of recipes. The recipes in the database currently were entered using a SAS program and borrowing work's SAS server to process it. The next recipes will be entered using the new form as a test run of how well it works. I expect I will revise the form quite a bit to make it flow better. I also have to figure out how to merge disparate measurements, e.g., cups and ounces, and only display a total quantity on the grocery list. Some merges will not be possible, as the above image shows for kosher salt: 7.5 tsp and "to taste". (Note the odd "40 taste" - this is a conversion of the ingredient "8 dashes of hot sauce", which is unquantifiable, and the dummy records I entered had 5 of the same recipe, thus "40 taste".) Then there's the conversion into a "better" database tool and using web forms instead of these proprietary-format forms.

For now, though, I am very happy that the database, although not fully populated with recipes, is usable and can save the user (just my wife, for now) a lot of time.

A Room

A Room with a Nu

A Room with a Gnu

Original room image credit jaybergesen (source).