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Update: I moved to Raleigh North Carolina to go to grad school, and I got a job at SAS. I have a great roomate Emily and am loving life. School starts soon and then I can get back to math, this summer has been the best one I have ever had :)

I haven't written in a while as I have been very busy. In terms of school I am taking 22 credit hours so I am really loaded down.
In terms of statistics I have been working with SAS on Linux, SAS released a Linux version starting with 8.2 and while the results and basic functionality between that and the windows version are comparable the gui really needs some work.The set up is clumsy and the graphics are archaic. Enhanced editor is non existent, I hope with the version 9 release some of this will be cleared up.

In my own little world I moved out of my house in October and am now living back on campus.

In other stat news I am also working with moment generating functions and multivariate distributions. So far I have only brushed the surface so no code yet, but soon...I wish we had 40 hour days :).

I got a laptop for Christmas which has made my quality of life improve exponetally. I also got something I have wanted for years from Mark a GPS!! I can't wait to go geocaching! So although I am really busy, I am the happiest I have ever been :)

I think I am going to use Hart's approximation for several distributions, some of the formulas can achieve precision out to 20 decimal places, this is the best I have seen so far. I really want to try and stay away from any expansion derived approximations which associate the number of observations while still getting the precision I need.

Anna -n- Schey

Back to distributions. I took a crack at normal today and came up with the following options, I could use an asymptotic expansion, or a power series I found an interesting approximation by C Hastings, at least it was interesting until I tried it and it produced crap results. All and all I am in love with the handbook of mathematical functions, and things are going well. If anyone has had any luck with a fast precise algorithm pls. do share :)

In personal news (in case anyone cares) my bf just got back from a trip and bought me a stuffed penguin from FAO Schwarz it's kwel.

I am also going to NC for the Tech Circus it's nothing huge and technical but should be fun. Plus I will get to see some friends, mgalgoci, mark, timball etc.

* anna naps with penguin *
:-)