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 [...]
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 [...]
One of the many things that I sit around pondering when I should be doing productive things is the idea of analytical workflow. I have only worked with one analytical guru who I felt really gave thought and structure to workflow and its impact on analyist productivity. When I talk about workflow I mean the [...]
So Andrew Gelman hates box plots. Not that you should give a buck what Gelman thinks. I’m just setting this blog post up, OK. So stick with me. Gelman also thought this XKCD cartoon was NOT funny :
There’s some correlation as well as causation. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the reason Gelman [...]
Recently when reading the Revolutions R Blog they talked about getting to the actual source of routines in R. They linked to an R News PDF from a couple years back. The actual text of the article is buried 43 pages into the PDF. To increase awareness and for my own future reference I’m going [...]
Tibco acquired Insightful last year. Many folks have reported that S-Plus (the closed source implementation of the S language) was dang near financially killed by the success of R (the open source implementation of the S language). I may be slow on the update, but today I learned that a company named World Programming is [...]
After writing the previous entry about Taleb and Mandelbrot I was thinking, “hey, I should be able to create the Mandelbrot set using R.” I’ve never actually tried to code the Mandelbrot set, but it seems easy enough. Well I messed with it for 2 maybe 3 seconds and then Googled [Mandelbrot set r] and, [...]
Robert Gentleman, left, and Ross Ihaka, the creators of R. Picture courtesy of the New York Times
For those of us who use R on a regular basis it was pretty neat to see a mainstream media piece on the R language. Ashlee Vance of the New York Times did a good job on the piece. [...]