Kickstarter, a social funding platform where individuals can chip in cash to get a worthy project going, just celebrated their 10,000th kickstarted project. Kickstart employee Fred Benenson recognized the achievement by visualizing the funding of music, design, art, game and many other kinds of projects using R and ggplot2. For example, here's a chart that shows the increasing rate...
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Showcasing the latest phylogenetic methods: AUTEUR
While high-speed fish feeding videos may be the signature of the lab, dig a bit deeper and you’ll find a wealth of comparative phylogenetic methods sneaking in. It’s a natural union — expert functional morphology is the key to good … Continue reading →
Shorting Mebane Faber
Although I do not personally know Mebane Faber, I know enough that I do not want to short him. However, I thought it would be insightful to see how the short side of his “A Quantitative Approach To Tactical Asset Allocation” might look. Once ...
The Road to Default: The Other Side of the Story
Okay so I was gliding through the articles of CNBC.com and stumbled upon one titled, "A Downgrade of U.S. Debt Won't Matter as Much as You Think." The argument laid down in this piece is that insurance companies and pension funds are required to hold h...
Looking for NppToR beta testers.
NppToR 2.6 is coming with improved flexibility and speed. Testers needed before setting as default.
Version 1.3 Verified
Whew, For a few hours last night I struggled with a bug, err several bugs. In the end some of the bugs were mine, some of them were “upstream” and some of them were far “upstream”. Image bugs in R 2.13.1. But the math bugs ( or flat out errors on my part) have all 
Growth in data-related jobs
At job-search site indeed.com, you can take a look at trends in the use of keywords used in job postings. As you might expect, job postings containing terms related to making sense from data are on the rise. Here's the growth in job postings mentioning big data: And here's statistician: The drop-off in demand for statisticians 2011 seems to...
Extracting EOD Data from BSE
Earlier, I had worked around to download Bhavcopy from NSE. Now, I would make a similar attempt to download the BSE BhavcopyObjective: Download Bhavcopy (Equity) from http://www.bseindia.com and save only relevant columns Date, Symbol, Name, Open, High...
Extracting EOD Data from NSE
My prime interest being the Indian financial markets, the first step would be to get the data to play around. NSE India provides EOD of data as bhavcopies. The same are stored as zipped files at their servers. Downloading them one by one for a larger t...
Geocoding addresses from Missouri Sex Offender Registry
Computer Assisted Reporting This is the second of four articles about analyzing distances between sex offenders and child daycare centers in Missouri as part of a joint project with KSHB NBC Action News in Kansas City. The previous article gave details...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
