Rand’s research while affiliated with Santa Monica College and other places

Most futurists would agree that long term forecasts (35-200 years) are very difficult and many have been discouraged by the failure of the much-heralded Club of Rome Limits to Growth forecasts of the early 70s and the unexpected and sudden end of the Cold War in the early 90s. To celebrate the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 74 noted commentators from many fields were asked to predict what American life would be like in the 1990s. One commentator wrote that by the 1990s most businesses would communicate by means of electric transmissions while another suggested that rising productivity would result in a maximum three-hour workday. This contrast illustrates the central challenge of long term forecasting—any single description or model of the future is almost certain to prove wrong. However a diverse set of future visions may capture something important about the future that will actually transpire but we cannot identify the accurate scenarios at the time we make our forecast. This was the starting point for the Long Term Policy Analysis (LTPA) project of the RAND Pardee Center. The latter's mission is to develop methods to enhance the overall future quality and condition of human life by improving long-range global policy and forecasting methods. The RAND methods consider large ensembles (hundreds to millions) of scenarios; seek robust not optimal strategies; achieve robustness through adaptive strategies and design software and analytic methods for the interactive exploration of the multiplicity of plausible futures. The authors illustrate this approach in detail using the example of global sustainable development. The RAND approach differs from others first in use of computer software to generate many scenarios. Second, it does not seek optimal strategies to achieve somebody's long term expectations but rather near term strategies that are robust in the sense that they perform reasonably well compared to the alternatives across a wide range of plausible scenarios and value systems. Furthermore LTPA strategies must adapt or evolve over time in response to new information so as to shape options available to future generations.

Getting SAS to interact with other databases is often vital to the success of a project, but this can be a problem when SAS and the databases being used are on different platforms. This paper discusses connecting SAS to a Microsoft SQL Server from both PC and Linux environments using SAS/ACCESS and the odbc engine. The paper also discusses the role the Libname Statement and the Pass Through Facility play in this connection. Proc SQL, macro variables, and some basic SQL settings and syntax will be discussed to demonstrate the power of this connection. Finally, UnixODBC and FreeTDS are discussed as third-party tools in getting the Linux environment set up.