Posts Tagged ‘ Serendipity ’

It has been a while since I got to announce a new community for SAS users.  Our latest community contains great information targeted at users of SAS Drug Development.  This community deviates from our usual offering.  The SAS Drug Development Forum ...
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Back in September, I shared performance help for SAS 9 users who run on Windows 2008.  At that time, I promised more insights from Margaret Crevar.  Your next installment has arrived! For all the SAS customers running on AIX (5, 6, or 7), please note...
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I've written about how to add a diagonal line to a scatter plot by using the SGPLOT procedure in SAS 9.2. The main idea (use the VECTOR statement) is easy enough, but wriiting a program that handles a line with any slope requires some additional effort...
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The other day I needed to compute the signum function for each element of a matrix. If x is a real number, then the sgn(x) is -1 when x<0, 1 when x>0, and 0 when x=0. I wrote a SAS/IML module that contains a compact little expression: proc iml...
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I recently blogged about how many times, on average, you must roll a die until you see all six faces. This question is a special case of the coupon collector's problem. My son noted that the expected value (the mean number of rolls) is not necessarily ...
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"Dad? How many times do I have to roll a die until all six sides appear?" I stopped what I was doing to consider my son's question. Although I could figure out the answer mathematically, sometimes experiments are more powerful than math equations for s...
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Yesterday, Jiangtang Hu did a frequency analysis of my blog posts and noticed that there are some holidays on which I post to my blog and others on which I do not. The explanation is simple: I post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, provided that SAS...
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Dates and times. As Wayne Finley states in his SUGI25 paper on SAS date and time handling, "The SAS system provides a plethora of methods to handle date and time values." Along with the plethora of methods is a plethora of papers on the topic. If you ...
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