I do some work from home, some work from an office in Chicago and some work on the road. It’s not uncommon for me to want to tunnel all my web traffic through a VPN tunnel. In one of my previous blog posts I alluded to using Amazon EC2 as a way to get around [...]
I’ve been continuing to muck around with using R inside of Amazon Elastic Map reduce jobs. I’ve been working on abstracting the lapply() logic so that R will farm the pieces out to Amazon EMR. This is coming along really well, thanks in no small part to the Stack Overflow [r] community. I have no [...]
I’m kinda blown away by the number of folks who have joined the Chicago R User Group (RUG) in the last few weeks. As of this morning we have 65 people signed up for the group and 25 who have said that they are planning on attending the meetup this Thursday (yes, only 3 days [...]
On Tuesday May 4th at 9:30 PM central, 10:30 eastern, I’ll be giving a live online presentation as part of the Vconf.org open conference series. I’ll be speaking about R and why I started using R a couple years ago. This is NOT going to be a technical presentation but rather an illustration of how [...]
Back in November 2009 Wired wrote an article about some grad students who decided to try to stochastically model throwing darts. Because I don’t actually read printed material I didn’t see the article until a couple of months ago. My immediate thought was, “hey, I drink beer. I throw darts. I build stochastic models. Why [...]
I’ve been a long time reader of the blog “Messy Matters” (which invokes terrible images now that I am potty training a toddler). The authors, Sharad Goel and Daniel Reeves are academics who work in the Microeconomics and Social Systems (get it, MESS?!?) lab funded by Yahoo!. (What does Strunk and [...]
I think we all know that Morris Day was talking about when he wrote the lyrics to “The Bird”:
Yes! Hold on now, this dance ain’t for everybody.
Just the sexy people.
White folks, you’re much too tight.
You gotta shake your head like the black folks.
You might get some tonight.
Look out!
That’s right, he was talking about the new [...]
The future of math is statistics… and the language of that future is R:
I’ve often thought there was way too little “statistical intuition” in the workplace. I think Author Benjamin would agree.
Rumor has it that Joe Adler, author of the O’Reilly Book R in a Nutshell, has joined Linked In as a data scientist. But that does not keep him from still pumping out some interesting content over at OReilly.com. His latest article is about lookup performance in R. He does a great job giving code [...]
Stop wasting time reading my drivel. You need to head over the the DataWrangling.com blog and read Peter Skomoroch’s interview with Bradford Cross of FlightCaster.
Peter wrote up this interview back in August 2009, so I’m a little late to this party. There’s some really great quotes in this interview. Here’s a few of my fav [...]