# Monthly Archives: November 2012

## Picking Lotto Numbers

November 28, 2012
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There's not a lot you can do to increase your odds of winning the lottery tonight. With the PowerBall at \$500 million though, a lot of otherwise rational folks might be tempted into playing. For those of you newly tempted, it is important to remember a...

## Distribution of uptimes for high-performance computing systems

November 28, 2012
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Computers break down every now and again and this is a serious problem when an application needs runs on thousands of individual computers (nodes) plugged together; lots more hardware creates lots more opportunity for a failure that renders any subsequent calculations by working nodes possible wrong. The solution is checkpointing; saving the state of each

## Images as Voronoi tesselations

November 28, 2012
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This is probably the coolest-looking thing I’ve figured out how to do with raster images in R. Similar to (although not quite as impressive as) these images by Jeff Clark, I alter the simple k-means approach described in the previous post to...

## What Time Is It?

November 28, 2012
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$What Time Is It?$

A common scenario that I run into is time and how to deal with it. I often will do a  variety of summaries and analysis that need to be measured at different points in time. Whether I want to graph the data or review the results I need to be able to perform measurements relative

## Quick Shiny Demo – Exploring NHS Winter Sit Rep Data

November 28, 2012
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Having spent a chink of the weekend and a piece of yesterday trying to pull NHS Winter sitrep data into some sort of shape in Scraperwiki, (described, in part, here: When Machine Readable Data Still Causes “Issues” – Wrangling Dates…), I couldn’t but help myself last night and had a quick go at using RStudio’s

## Why [Not] Simulate?

November 27, 2012
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Since we are in the “big data” Era, which means that a massive amount of data are made daily available by governments, institutions, and ordinary people like you and me—the importance of simulate data for “frequentists”, like myself, seems to fade. After all, once we have access to “real data”, why bother with non-real data,

## I give up, I am embracing pie charts

November 27, 2012
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Most statisticians know that pie charts are a terrible way to plot percentages. You can find explanations here, here, and here as well as the R help file for the pie function which states: Pie charts are a very bad … Continue reading →

## Using R in the Human Resources department

November 27, 2012
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Ajay Ohri, author of R for Business Analytics, was recently interviewed about using R instead of Excel for human resources management. Human Resources is an increasingly analytics-driven field, with predictive modeling now used to prioritize applicants for interview and to organize workspaces, to give just two examples. As Ajay points out, R gets over the limitations of spreadsheets: There...

## Rcpp 0.10.1

November 27, 2012
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A the new Rcpp release 0.10.1 arrived this morning on CRAN (as already has Windows binaries) and in Debian. This is a follow-up to the recent 0.10.0 release which extends the exciting new Rcpp-attributes and Rcpp-sugar work further, and as in a n...

## MCMC convergence assessment

November 27, 2012
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Richard Everitt tweetted yesterday about a recent publication in JCGS by Rajib Paul, Steve MacEachern and Mark Berliner on convergence assessment via stratification. (The paper is free-access.) Since this is another clear interest of mine’s, I had a look at the paper in the train to Besançon. (And wrote this post as a result.) The