Edward Tufte, a pioneer of effective data visualization (and a personal hero) has just been appointed by the White House to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds. Tufte explains: I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency,...
Blog Archives
Chilean earthquake: impact of the tsunami
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a page with some interesting information about last week's earthquake in Chile, but what really stood out for me was this chart of the predicted wave heights around the globe resulting from the associated tsunami: Click to enlarge: it's a fascinating chart. Although labelled a forecast, from the explanations on the...
InformationWeek on Urlocker
InformationWeek published today a profile of Zack Urlocker, the former MySQL executive who recently joined REvolution's board: Former MySQL staffer Zack Urlocker is going to try to do for predictive analytics what he once did for relational database systems: bring open source code to a user population that hasn't necessarily had access to the technology before. REvolution Computing of...
Because it’s Friday: Why a Salad Costs More than a Big Mac
In the US, at least. Via The Consumerist: Incidentally, the US FDA doesn't publish pyramids like this any more: it's now a garish personalized 2-d triangle with stripes. But at least it doesn't make the error of dimension committed by the left-hand pyramid: that orange section is a hell of a lot larger than 74% of the volume. The...
More on the Economist’s special report on big data
I totally missed this the other day, but there's much more to that special report on the data deluge in The Economist. (Thanks to readers SB and DN for pointing this out.) There's an total of nine articles in the report (you can find them all in the Related Items box on this page), including a section on business...
Intelligent Enterprise: You Can Predict that R Will Succeed
Analyst David Stodder at Intelligent Enterprise also noted the activity around R at the recent Predictive Analytics World conference in San Francisco, and he reviews his impressions in a column today. In fact, he attributes the increasing prominence of predictive analytics to R: Possibly the most important factor influencing the spread of predictive analytics is the growing popularity of...
Analyzing Google’s Winter Olympics Search Traffic with R
The Official Google Blog today includes an analysis of Google's search traffic related to the recently-concluded Winter Olympics, correlating various high-profile events with searches from particular countries. For example, traffic from the United States shows the expected diurnal cycle but with promintent peaks for the opening ceremony and the hockey matches featuring the USA team: It's not specifically stated...
MySQL alum Zack Urlocker join’s REvolution’s board
As you might have heard from this morning's press release, we've just welcomed a new member to REvolution's board of directors: Zack Urlocker. Zack has an impeccable open-source pedigree: until recently, he was responsible for engineering and marketing at MySQL, the wildly successful open-source database company recently acquired by Oracle (via its acquisition of Sun). Zack is also a...
ACM Data Mining Camp, March 20
Following last year's successful unconference on data mining, the Bay Area Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will again host the 2010 ACM Data Mining Camp on March 20 in San Jose, CA. The event is free and runs from 11:15am - 7:30pm, with an optional 2-hour pre-camp training in the morning. (REvolution Computing is a proud sponsor of this...
The Economist reports on the information explosion
The current edition of The Economist includes a "special report on managing information", targeting the issue of the information explosion / data deluge / whatever you want to call it these days. It includes the usual attributes of the problem: data is being collected faster than we can store it, astronomers are creating petabytes of data daily, the usual....
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
