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 [...]
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 [...]
Tonight (October 29, 2009) at 5:30 PM is the Chicago R meetup at Jaks tap. Here’s more info. I’ll be making a presentation based on my earlier blog post about plyr. The presentation will only be 8 minutes long so I’ve had to pick and choose my info carefully. OK, who am I kidding? I [...]
I’m not dead yet! Although it has been rumored that I am. The new job is going great and I’m thrilled to be with a new firm doing interesting work alongside smart people. It makes me seem smarter by simple association.
There’s been a lot going on recently in the R user community. There was an [...]
So one glace at my user logs shows the truth: no one gives a rat’s rump that I just quit my job; you just love you some Twitter R code. And I’m nothing but an attention whore, so come get some!
So in my last ‘Twitter with R’ post I gave you some code I’d written [...]
Dave, over at The Revolutions Blog, posted about the big ‘ol list of graphs created with R that are over at Wikimedia Commons. As I was scrolling through the list I recognized the standard normal distribution from the Wikipedia article on the same topic.
Below is the fairly simple source code with lots of comments. Here’s [...]
So I have started following the #RStats tag in twitter. Prior to a week ago I had never Twitterbated so I thought I would give it a go since I am not one to shy away from new technology… much. I think of Twitter like a call in radio show where I get to cut [...]
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 [...]