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Rick Wicklin 0
Distances between words

When you misspell a word on your mobile device or in a word-processing program, the software might "autocorrect" your mistake. This can lead to some funny mistakes, such as the following: I hate Twitter's autocorrect, although changing "extreme couponing" to "extreme coupling" did make THAT tweet more interesting. [@AnnMariaStat] When

Rick Wicklin 0
Matrices and mattresses

Birds migrate south in the fall. Squirrels gather nuts. Humans also have behavioral rituals in the autumn. I change the batteries in my smoke detectors, I switch my clocks back to daylight standard time, and I turn the mattress on my bed. The first two are relatively easy. There's even

Rick Wicklin 0
A math puzzle solution

I previously wrote about an intriguing math puzzle that involves 5-digit numbers with certain properties. This post presents my solution in the SAS/IML language. It is easy to generate all 5-digit perfect squares, but the remainder of the problem involves looking at the digits of the squares. For this reason,

Learn SAS
Shelly Goodin 0
SAS author's tip: macro functions %EVAL and %SYSEVALF

One of of my favorite reviewer quotes about Michele Burlew's book SAS Macro Programming Made Easy, Second Edition is" [ It ] helps eliminate the 'fear factor' often associated with using macros, while offering valuable insight to programmers with a broad range of experience." --Suson vonLehmden, RTI International I've worked with Michele Burlew

Rick Wicklin 0
Modeling Finite Mixtures with the FMM Procedure

In my previous post, I blogged about how to sample from a finite mixture distribution. I showed how to simulate variables from populations that are composed of two or more subpopulations. Modeling a response variable as a mixture distribution is an active area of statistics, as judged by many talks

Angela Hall 0
Tip on creating graphic files in specific locations

When trying to write out graphics to a specific filename location, the gsfname option is only honored when ODS LISTING is turned on and ODS HTML is turned off. This is especially important in 9.3 Base SAS as the ODS HTML option is the default output destination. Enterprise Guide users

Rick Wicklin 0
The effect of holidays on US births

Last week I showed a graph of the number of US births for each day in 2002, which shows a strong day-of-the-week effect. The graph also shows that the number of births on a given day is affected by US holidays. This blog post looks closer at the holiday effect.

Rick Wicklin 0
Evaluate polynomials efficiently by using Horner's scheme

Polynomials are used often in data analysis. Low-order polynomials are used in regression to model the relationship between variables. Polynomials are used in numerical analysis for numerical integration and Taylor series approximations. It is therefore important to be able to evaluate polynomials in an efficient manner. My favorite evaluation technique

Chris Hemedinger 0
What's our sign?

Rick Wicklin and I are engaged in an arms race of birthday-related blog posts.  To recap: Rick analyzed national data about births in the USA and what time of year they are most likely to occur. I responded by analyzing the birthdays of my Facebook friends. Rick responded by analyzing

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