Statistics PhD student Nathan VanHoudnos has an 8-core laptop, and by his own admission, takes "an almost unhealthy pleasure in pushing computer to its limits". It seems like he's found an outlet for this passion with the new doSMP library included with Revolution R, that allows him to use all his processors for some gnarly simulations in R:...
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Comparing 2010 and 2007 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Trends
See my Arctic Update Page for daily updates on Arctic Sea Ice Extent In this post I present a chart that tracks the daily Arctic Sea ice Extent (SIE) for 2007 and 2010. I chose 2007 as the comparison year … Continue reading →
Plot Multiple Time Series using the flow / inkblot / river / ribbon / volcano / hourglass / area / whatchamacallit plots ~ blue whale catch per country w/ ggplot2
Ever since I first looked at this NYT visualization by Amanda Cox, I’ve always wanted to reproduce this in R. This is a plot that stacks multiple time series onto one another, with the width of the river/ribbon/hourglass representing the strength at each time. The NYT article used box office revenue as the width of 
Another harmonic mean approximation
Martin Weinberg posted on arXiv a revision of his paper, Computing the Bayesian Factor from a Markov chain Monte Carlo Simulation of the Posterior Distribution, that is submitted to Bayesian Analysis. I have already mentioned this paper in a previous post, but I remain unconvinced of the appeal of the paper method, given that it 
Weekend art in R (Part 2)
I put together four of the best looking images generated by the code shown here: # More aRt par(bg="white") par(mar=c(0,0,0,0)) plot(c(0,1),c(0,1),col="white",pch=".",xlim=c(0,1),ylim=c(0,1)) iters = 500 for(i in 1:iters) { center = runif(2) size = 1/rbeta(2,1,3) # Let's create random HTML-style colors color = sample(c(0:9,"A","B","C","D","E","F"),12,replace=T) fill = paste("#", paste(color[1:6],collapse=""),sep="") brdr = paste("#", paste(color[7:12],collapse=""),sep="") points(center[1], center[2],
Stock Analysis using R
Want to do some quick, in depth technical analysis of Apple stock price using R? Theres a package for that!The Quantmod package allows you to develop, testing, and deploy of statistically based trading models. It provides the infrastructure for d...
Read Compressed Zip Files in R
One of the great things that I am learning about R is that it is really powerful as a data management tool. I just found how to unzip files. I could use Python for this in SPSS, but it just feels like it is more natural to do in R. Of course, you have to 
Because it’s Friday: Insect sex
Birds do it, bees do it. But the bees and their insect brethren definitely do it in a more interesting way. Don't believe me? Check out Isabella Rosselini's description of bee sex and the other videos in her educational "Green Porno" series. It's fascinating stuff. For some light summer reading, I also recommend Olivia Judson's "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice...
Pollution from the BP oil spill
There's been a lot of talk about the slicks and plumes of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but how does the presence of that oil translate into measurable pollution in the air, water, and sediment? The EPA is now releasing pollutants and making the data available for analysis. Because the data are online, it's a simple process to...
ASCII Scatterplots in R
I really like R‘s stem function, it creates a stem-and-leaf plot right in the R console, no fancy graphics devices required! In a recent R-help post, Ralf Bierig presented a very nice ASCII scatterplot representing two densities. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any R function that will generate this type of plot, but I will
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
