So, I decided to sit down and have a little fun with that Failed States Index data I put together. To start, I expect that the dataset will be pretty linearly correlated with the polity IV data. This makes sense–true democracies aren’t failed states, and failed states tend not to be democratic. To test this,
I need some new R skills, and there is no better motivation to learn XML in R than one of the scariest financial datasets out there—the US Department of the Treasury Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) Quarterly Derivatives Report. I’ll...
If you want the graphics you create with R to look their best, in general it's best to go for a vector-based graphics format instead of a raster-based format. Common formats like GIF and JPG are raster-based: the image is composed of pixels, and if you don't choose a high enough resolution, you're likely to lose fine details and/or...
I have been starting to analyze some data I have of repeated counts of salamanders from 5 plots over 4 years. I am trying to develop a predictive model of salamander nighttime surface activity as a function of weather variables. The repeated counting l...
Rick Wicklin contacted me with a helpful suggestion for improving the data presentation method outlined in my previous post on using ggplot2 to visualize some data. In the previous post I had plotted up a highly correlated set of points, showing the correspondence between maximum daily body temperatures of model snails sitting with the foot
Yesterday I posted a very simple math puzzle to Twitter that I found in Jonathan Baron’s book, Thinking and Deciding. The puzzle is the following: Show that every number of the form ABC,ABC is divisible by 13. The puzzle comes up in Baron’s book as an example of an “insight problem” in which one goes
Yesterday I posted a very simple math puzzle to Twitter that I found in Jonathan Baron’s book, Thinking and Deciding. The puzzle is the following: Show that every number of the form ABC,ABC is divisible by 13. The puzzle comes up in Baron’s book as an example of an “insight problem” in which one goes
Ask anyone how much time has elapsed since September last year and they’ll probably start counting on their fingers: “October, November…” and tell you “just over 9 months.” So, when faced as I was today with a data frame (named dates) like this: How to add a 7th column, with the number of months between 
I recently read Ewan Birney's blog post, which I found echoed a lot of my own thoughts about the use of statistical in computational biology. I thought I would compile my own similar list but for bioinformatics / computational biology in general. I have not been and in the field as long as Ewan and I certainly still...
Dave Backus points me to this review by anthropologist Mike McGovern of two books by economist Paul Collier on the politics of economic development in Africa. My first reaction was that this was interesting but non-statistical so I’d have to either post it on the sister blog or wait until the 30 days of statistics
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
