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
After recently having to think critically about the value of various R packages for social science research, I realized that others might find value in a post on “must-have” R packages for social scientists. After the immensely popular post on this topic for Python packages a follow-up seemed appropraite. If you conduct social
Let’s say that you’re fitting a cumbersome model so time is not to waste over a PC staring at the screen half anxious-half bored…
Then, you can always leave and go on with meetings and all your daily routine and have R notify you the results! How?
We will illustrate the situation above using some Bayesian Model 
Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D Moore's reimagined version of the rather cheesy 70's sci-fi series) has been my favourite TV series (of any genre) of recent years, so I'm especially excited that Chris Bilder has given me the chance to blog about it. Chris, an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, recently published an...
I’m a little surprised by Andrew Gelman’s post today, doubting the wisdom of a passage from Gary Becker’s work that reads: According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent “suicides” in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
This term, I’ve been sitting in on Rene Carmona’s course on Modern Regression and Time Series Analysis. Much of the material on regression covered in the course was familiar to me already, but I’ve never felt that I had a real command of times series analysis methods. When Carmona defined the AR(p) model in class
I was prompted by a thread on the apparent decline of FriendFeed to look for evidence of declining participation in my networks. First, a quick and dirty Ruby script, tls.rb to grab the Life Scientists feed and count the likes and comments: #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'rubygems' require 'json/pure' require 'net/http' require 'open-uri' def format_date(d) if d 
R has a lot of functions. Add in all the packages on CRAN, and then there's a lot of functions. You can search through the contents of the function documentation at places like Rseek.org, but the R Graphical Manual takes a different tack on exploring the functions in R: rather than browsing by the name or description of the...
That’s it!, “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R” is out, truly out, I have received a copy from Springer by express mail today! (If you need any further proof, it is also advertised as In stock by Amazon.) Given that the printer exactly reproduces the pdf file sent to Springer, there is no element of 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
