In Tangente n⁰42, there was a dataset about the size of cuckoo eggs against the species (goldcrest and warbler) which built the nest. (The whole dataset from Latter is analysed in Maindonald and Braun’s Data Analysis and Graphics Using R, with a degree of caution about how trustworthy this data is…) This is 
SocialFlow's blog has a great case study today on how news from a single tweet -- in this case, speculation made an hour before the President's announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed -- can propagate through social networks. At 10:24 p.m. EST on Sunday May 1, Keith Urbahn tweeted: "So I'm told by a reputable person they...
![What value is cross country GDP correlation? [Part One]](http://www.backsidesmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/now-gc1-1024x489.jpg)
The above graph borders on chartjunk (and is nothing like Paul Butler’s amazing Facebook map). We can see some variation in color but mostly it is a set of lines between 152 country capitals with no means to determine which … Continue reading →
Lately I’ve been doing some work with creating ad-hoc clusters of EC2 machines. My ultimate goal is to create a simple way to spin up a cluster of EC2 machines for use with Bryan Lewis’s very cool doRedis backend for the R foreach package. But that’s a whole other post. What I was scratching my
When you draw a histogram, an important question is “how many bar should I draw?”. This should inspire an indignant response. You didn’t become a programmer to answer questions, did you? No. The whole point of programming is to let your computer do your thinking for you, giving you more time to watch videos of 
I've been running for the last couple of months a lot of simulations written in R on legion cluster here at UCL. But I still do many things on our quad-core server here at the institute, and parallelising the simulations is extremely handy.S...
I've been running for the last couple of months a lot of simulations written in R on legion cluster here at UCL. But I still do many things on our quad-core server here at the institute, and parallelising the simulations is extremely handy.S...
I've been using an OceanOptics USB4000 spectrometer in research on biomass accumulation and climate in South Africa.
This post presents a R function that will read in JCAMP files from the SpectraSuite software and output a vector of reflectance values. SpectraSuite can convert binary output files to JCAMP files if they weren't saved as JCAMP.
You...
I've been using an OceanOptics USB4000 spectrometer in research on biomass accumulation and climate in South Africa.This post presents a R function that will read in JCAMP files from the SpectraSuite software and output a vector of reflectance values.&...
I’m helping out some colleagues learn programming from having zero experience with it in any shape or form. It’s quite a daunting task in some senses, because, well, it may not be easy! They are researchers, so they’ll need it for processing data and generating output, and perhaps processing BIG DATA at some point too.
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
