On Dataists, a new collaborative blog for data hackers that I’m contributing to, we’ve just announced a data contest that’s custom made for R users. To win the contest, you need to build a recommendation system for R packages. To find out more, check out the official announcement on Dataists. Then go to GitHub to
Monthly Archives: October 2010
Using Data Tools to Find Data Tools, the Yo Dawg of Data Hacking
by John Myles White and Drew Conway Editors’ Note: One theme likely to recur on dataists.com is that data hackers love using their tools to analyze, visualize, and predict everything. Data hackers also love discovering and learning about new tools. So it should come as no surprise that Dataist contributors John Myles White and Drew
R is Hot: Part 1
This is Part 1 of a five-part article series, with new parts published each Thursday. You can download the complete article from the Revolution Analytics website. How Did a Statistical Programming Language Invented in New Zealand Become a Global Sensation? Much in the same way that social networking, reality TV and craft beer were considered marginal fads before gaining...
LondonR Rcpp slides
I'm just back to london where I presented about Rcpp at mango's LondonR event. This was the third time (after rmetrics and useR!) I presented these slides, so I allowed myself some new metaphores about my long term relationship with R and my ind...
Science is vital – what we don’t know yet
This post is not about R (for a change). For working UK scientists, science is vital – sign the on-line petition to preserve science funding. For my contribution of what we don’t know yet - We don’t know whether we can use biomarkers of kidney injury to personalise the doses of medications to maximise the 
Creating GUIs in R with gWidgets
The gWidgets framework is a way of creating graphical user interfaces in a toolkit independent way. That means that you can choose between tcl/tk, Gtk, Java or Qt underneath the bonnet. There's also a web-version based upon RApache and ExtJS. Since the code is the same in each case, you can change your mind and swap toolkits...
R is Hot
Our mission at Revolution Analytics is to make R the statistical analysis tool of choice in the workplace. But even though R is pervasive in academia and rising in popularity generally, we still sometimes get blank faces when we demonstrate R to potential new clients. Sure, most people have heard of R -- it's been hard to miss in...
Belgian Astronomers and Exercise Machines
In the twisting paths of human discovery, you never quite know what intellectual enterprise is going to result in a world changing discovery. For instance, the mathematical notion of expected value did not grow up in a sterile, academic environment. In 1654 Blaise Pascal was approached by Chevalier de Méré who was interested...
Belgian Astronomers and Exercise Machines
In the twisting paths of human discovery, you never quite know what intellectual enterprise is going to result in a world changing discovery. For instance, the mathematical notion of expected value did not grow up in a sterile, academic environment. In 1654 Blaise Pascal was approached by Chevalier de Méré who was interested...
Convert decimal to IEEE-754 in R
For some theory on the standard IEEE-754, you can read the Wikipedia page. Here I will post only the code of the function to make the conversion in R.
First we write some functions to convert decimal numbers to binary numbers:
decInt_to_8bit q r xx for(i in 1:precs){
xx q r xx }
rr return(rr)
}
devDec_to_8bit nas nbs xxs for(i in 1:precs)
{
xxs...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
