Seth writes: Here’s my candidate for bad graphic of the year: I studied it and learned nothing. I have no idea how they assigned colors to locations. I already knew that there were more within-city calls than calls to individual distant locations — for example that there are more SF-SF calls than SF-LA calls.
Today, cloud computing is used in many application areas from academic research to industry. Commercial cloud providers as Amazon Web Services (AWS) advertise the simple and fast access to cloud computing resources. Posts in different blogs proof that you can get your application running in the cloud, but it will cost you more than 15
Here is an interesting question from Tomàs that echoes a lot of related emails: I’m turning to you for advice. I’m facing problem where parameter space is bounded, e.g. all parameters have to be positive. If in MCMC as proposal distribution I use normal distribution, then at some iterations I get negative proposals. So my 
Update: An expanded version of this tutorial will appear in the new Elsevier book Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications by Gary Miner et. al which is now available for pre-order from Amazon. In conjunction with the book, I have cleaned up the tutorial code and published it on github. 
The R.NET project provides a mechanism for communicating with R from a .NET application. This appears to be a promising way to create simple interfaces to some of the functionality of R. Some examples of using R.NET can be found here and here.
The R Project would not exist without the contributions of the R Core Group, the 21 volunteer statisticians and computer scientists from around the world who have donated their time and expertise to create the R langauge, its core packages, and manage its regular release and binary distribution process via the CRAN network. Many Core Group members also tirelessly...
I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description
Time to horrify some people.
First let's include the code we wrote last time,
> source("pretend.R")
and the dependency-tracking environment it creates will be used to run all the following examples.
Let's look at, I don't know, I'm just trying to demonstrate a language feature so uh... band-pass filtering Gaussian noise.
Here's some noise:
I have something a fondness for ridiculous variable names, so it’s useful to be able to check whether my latest concoction is legitimate. More so if it is automatically generated. Not having an is_valid_variable_name function is one of those odd omissions from R, and the assign function doesn’t check validity. To recap, there are a 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
