A new package OpenStreetMap has been released to CRAN this week which is designed to allow you to easily add satellite imagery, or open street maps to your plots. Raster maps are a great way to add context to your spatial data with a minimum outlay of effort. The syntax in OpenStreetMap is fairly simple, just give
Version 1.6 has just been submitted to CRAN and I will post the source here in the dropbox. Version 1.6 will probably be stable for a long time unless I find a bug. The main additions I made were adding a few functions to make some things easier, and I converted two files–flags and sources– 
ThinkStats (by Allen B. Downey) is a good book to get you familiar with statistics (and even Python, if you’ve done some scripting in other languages). I thought it would be interesting to present some of the examples & exercises in the book in R. Why? Well, once you’ve gone through the material in a
Running DEoptim in parallel has been on the development team's wishlist for awhile. It had not been a priority though, because none of us have personally needed it. An opportunity arose when Kris Boudt approached me about collaborating to a...
It has been a wonderful week in Roma, a mix of pleasant work and enjoyable free-time! I gave the ABC advanced course for the second time in a month so it did not require much in terms of preparation and there was a good sized audience with attentive (if too silent!) students and friends as 
For those who have not read the seminal works of Tufte and Cleveland, please hang your heads in shame. To salvage some sense of self-worth, you can then head over to Solomon Messing’s blog where he is starting a series on data visualization based on ...
THIS BLOG DOES NOT CONSTITUTE INVESTMENT ADVICE. ACTING ON IT WILL MOST LIKELY BE DETRIMENTAL TO YOUR FINANCIAL HEALTH.After following some R-related quant finance blogs like Timely Portfolio, Systematic Investor or Quantitative tho...
The guys behind the Google Visualisation API don't seem to rest. On 22 February 2012 they released an update of their API. Google added options for a gradient colour axis to bubble chart and a magnifying glass to geo chart, which opens when the user ho...
This announcement was made by Hadley Wickham in the mailing list. ———————- # ggplot2 ggplot2 is a plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and avoid bad parts. It takes care of many of the fiddly details that make plotting a hassle (like drawing legends)...
Having introduced the R-index, it is time to look how it works. For this a simple example is sufficient. What happens if a product is different from another product. To make this at least slightly realistic, three products are needed. Two products will...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
