Rick Wicklin, PhD, is a distinguished researcher in computational statistics at SAS and is a principal developer of SAS/IML software. His areas of expertise include computational statistics, simulation, statistical graphics, and modern methods in statistical data analysis. Rick is author of the books Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software and Simulating Data with SAS.
The tail of a probability distribution is an important notion in probability and statistics, but did you know that there is not a rigorous definition for the "tail"? The term is primarily used intuitively to mean the part of a distribution that is far from the distribution's peak or center.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. --Mark Twain In the popular Cryptoquote puzzle, you are presented with an enciphered version of a quote by a famous person. One of the appeals of the puzzle for me is reading the deciphered quote, such
SAS/IML 13.1 includes a handy function for programmers who write a lot of modules. The PARENTNAME function obtains the name of the symbol that was passed in as a parameter to a user-defined module. How is this useful? Well, suppose that you want to create a SAS/IML module that prints
