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 [...]
I just came back from the future and let me be the first to tell you this: Learn some Chinese. And more than just cào nǐ niáng (肏你娘) which your friend in grad school told you means “Live happy with many blessings”. Trust me, I’ve been hanging with Madam Wu and she told me [...]
One of my primary uses for R is to build stochastic simulations of insurance portfolios and reinsurance treaties. It’s not uncommon for each of my simulations to take 20 seconds or more to complete (if you’re doing the math, that’s 55 hours for 10K sims or, approximately 453 games of solitaire) . Initially I ran [...]
Recently I’ve run into frustrations with Iron Mountain Connected Backup so I’ve been looking for alternatives.
Alternatives: I’ve been running Jungle Disk at home and really like it. I could use that at work except I have not set up an Amazon or RackSpace account with my work credit card. But I am in Chicago and my [...]
It’s common knowledge that I struggle wrapping my head around the apply functions in R. That is illustrated very clearly in the following discussion on Stack Overflow:
Dirk’s comment is actually spot on. I’ve asked the same damn question at least 4-5 times. Only I didn’t really understand it was the same question. That’s one of [...]
So for the rest of this conversation big data == 2 Gigs. Done. Don’t give me any of this ‘that’s not big, THIS is big’ shit. There now, on with the cool stuff:
This week on twitter Vince Buffalo asked about loading a 2 gig comma separated file (csv) into R (OK, he asked about tab [...]
The alternative title of this blog post is “How to get your sorry ass fired by violating your internal IT policies.” So keep that in mind as you read this.
I say lots of silly crap. Twitter allows me the pleasure of sharing this blather with the world. I was a little surprised that of all [...]