Today my R Resources page was the link de jour over at The Revolutions blog. So if you came here from there, welcome. And don’t touch anything here, I haven’t dusted in a while.
If you’re an R geek (stop trying to look innocent, I can see that you are) then you may find my post [...]
As an economist who has a fascination with open source software, I found this article in Wired about microfinance lending for open source hardware totally engaging. Regulatory issues are clearly an issue for these guys. From the article:
Zopa’s Pitts agrees that the Open Source Hardware Bank needs to figure out how to navigate through the [...]
Today (March 24th) is Ada Lovelace day. It’s a day to remember that chicks dig technology and you don’t have to have a penis to be a geek. Mom, I know you find that hard to believe but it’s true.
So part of Ada Lovelace day is to blog about women in technology. I love technology. [...]
Leo Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the famous lines: “All happy families are happy in the same way. All miserable families are miserable in their own way.”
I did my graduate thesis on the spatial relationship of stochastic variables. The stochastic variable which I found most interesting at the time was farmer corn [...]
Lately I have been struggling for what type of database to use for my analytics work. SQL Server is a really good database but I always get the feeling it was built for stuff other than what I want to do with it. I keep feeling like I am digging post holes with a spade [...]
Since I am an economist and not a computer scientist I sometimes feel like I’m not a real programmer, even though I spend hours hacking together bad code. One of my feelings of inadequacy is that all my programs seem to spend 85% of the time on what I have come to call “plumbing” and [...]
It geeky circles there’s often talk of finding your “flow.” The term was coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and which he revisits in the smaller and more readable Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. The general idea is finding the state where you [...]
I’ve been struggling for a while on which database to use for my working data. I used to use MS Access quite a lot. The problems with MS Access include but are not limited to:
2 GB file size limit, at least historically
Versions change with each edition of MS Office
Sort of tough to write SQL scripts
Very [...]
When he’s not sitting around thinking about how sexy statisticians are I am, he apparently gives speaking engagements. Who knew? Here’s a video of him saying stuff about managing “knowledge workers.” I believe that “knowledge workers” is a euphemism for “people who like to play video games.” I could be wrong, but not likely.
In honor of me moving to Chicago, the powers who abide have decided to hold the first annual “R/Finance conference for applied finance using R” conference in Chicago this year. The dates are April 24-25, 2009.
R/Finance 2009: Applied Finance with R
To those who made the decision on location, I’m pleased but slightly embarrassed that you [...]