How can I embed a small data set into my R code? That was the question I came across today, when I prepared my talk about Dynamical Systems in R with simecol for the forthcoming Cologne R user group meeting. I wanted to add all the R code of the ...

The other day I found some old basic code I had written about 15 years ago on a Mac Classic II to plot the Feigenbaum diagram for the logistic map. I remember, it took the little computer the whole night to produce the chart.With today's computers even...

The data of the World Bank is absolutely amazing. I had said this before, but their updated iPhone App gives me a reason to return to this topic. Version 3 of the DataFinder App allows you to visualise the data on your phone, including motion maps, see...

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) worked together with OpenDataCity to create an online train monitor of the German network: Zugmonitor. This is another great example of the new form of data journalism.The project provides access to data o...

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...

Am 30. März 2012 möchte ich gerne das erste Kölner R Benutzer Treffen organisieren. Ich habe an den Treffen in London in den vergangen Jahren teilgenommen und hoffe auch in Köln Gleichgesinnte zu finden, die sich gerne bei einem Kölsch über R and...

I had mentioned the Guardian's data blog and the need for more data journalism earlier here. What I really like about the Guardian's approach in particular is that they share the data of their articles and encourage readers to use it.Of course there ar...

Removable disk packs in 1975Source: Wikipedia, via Deutsche Fotothek  David Chan from City University is organising an interdisciplinary symposium on tackling the ‘Big Data’ challenge on 1 March 2012.It is an open seminar trying to bring ...

During my university time I worked on the IT help desk for a while. One day I received a call from a professor, who said that his printer had stopped working. So I asked him, if there was a message on the display and if he could read it to ...

The other day I wrote about the R functions by, apply and friends, which allow me to operate on subsets of data. All those functions work nicely, if the data is given in the right format. More often than not it isn't and I have to reshape the data befo...

Version 0.2.14 of the googleVis package was released on CRAN today.ChangesThe help files have been checked against changes of the Google Visualisation API, typos in the vignette have been ironed out (thanks to Pat Burns for pointing them out), a new se...

I am amazed by the number of comments I received on my recent blog entry about "by", "apply" and friends. I had started my post by pointing out that R is a language. Well indeed, I have come to the conclusion, that it is a language with lots of irregul...

Iris versicolor (Source: Wikipedia)R is a language, as Luis Apiolaza pointed out in his recent post. This is absolutely true, and learning a programming language is not much different from learning a foreign language. It takes time and a lot of pr...

The financial crisis has put a lot of pressure on countries' long-term foreign currency credit ratings, with France recently being downgraded by S&P. Wikipedia provides a list of countries by credit ratings as report by US rating agencies S&P, Fitch, ...

Why the old and new the need to share time togetherIt takes time to appreciate the new. Even if the new is much better than the old. But, it is easy to forget when you yourself created the exciting new.At the end of August 2011 Google announced a new B...

Many thanks to all who participated in the survey about writing R package vignettes.Following my post last Thursday the responses came in quickly in the evening and all day on Friday. Since Saturday the response rate has been decreasing constantly and ...

I am currently co-writing the vignette for the ChainLadder package and wonder what I should be focusing on. I have co-written the vignette of the googleVis package in the past and based it purely and what I thought would work. So, this is an experiment...