The deadline for my book on R is fast approaching, so naturally I’m in full procrastination mode. So much so that I’ve spent this evening creating a brainfuck interpreter for R. brainfuck is a very simple programming language: you get an array of 30000 bytes, an index, and just 8 eight commands. You move the 
My old job at the Health & Safety Laboratory is being advertised, and at a higher pay grade to boot. (Though it is still civil service pay, and thus not going to make you rich.) You’ll need to have solid mathematical modelling skills, particularly solving systems of ODEs, and be proficient at writing scientific code, 
This is a silly problem that bit me again recently. It’s an elementary mistake that I’ve somehow repeatedly failed to learn to avoid in eight years of R coding. Here’s an example to demonstrate. Suppose we create a data frame with a categorical column, in this case the heights of ten adults along with their 
I’m writing a book on R for O’Reilly, and I need interesting datasets for the examples. Any data that you provide will get you a mention in the book and in the publicity material, so it’s a great opportunity to publicise your work or your organisation. Datasets from any area or industry are suitable; the 
Regular readers may know that I often make R-based GUIs. They’re great for giving non-technical users safe and easy access to statistical models. The safety comes from the restrictions of a GUI: you can limit what the users does more easily than with a command line, helping to reduce the number of opportunities for bad 
My girlfriend’s biological clock is ticking, and so we’ve started trying to spawn. Since I’m impatient, that has naturally lead to questions like “how long will it take?”. If I were to believe everything on TV, the answer would be easy: have unprotected sex once and pregnancy is guaranteed. A more cynical me suggests that 
assertive, my new package for writing robust code, is now on CRAN. It consists of lots of is functions for checking variables, and corresponding assert functions that throw an error if the condition doesn’t hold. For example, is_a_number checks that the input is numeric and scalar. In the last two cases, the return value of 
Earlier today Ben Goldacre posted about using Benford’s Law to try and detect fraud in the Russian elections. Read that now, or the rest of this post won’t make sense. This is a loose R translation of Ben’s Stata code. The data is held in a Google doc. While it is possible to directly retrieve 
I’ve been a user (and fan) of gWidgets for a couple of years now for GUI building in R. (See my introduction to it here.) However, it’s always good to check out the competition so I’ve been playing around with Deducer to see how they compare. R can access a number of GUI building frameworks 
A milestone, though not that exciting as questions go. Still, if you haven’t yet joined the cult of Stack Exchange, take a look here. Tagged: r, stackoverflow
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
