“In the end, it really is just a matter of choosing the relevant parts of mathematics and ignoring the rest. Of course, the hard part is deciding what is irrelevant.” Somehow, I had missed the first edition of this book and thus I started reading it this afternoon with a newcomer’s eyes (obviously, I will 
Are students' teaching evaluations influenced by instructors' looks? ggplot2 may help find the answer.The recent release of RcmdrPlugin.KMggplot2 has made ggplot2 available to those who prefer GUI to the command line interface. With the new plugin for ...
A simple yet efficient way to work with R consists in writing R code with your favorite text editor and sending it to the R console. This allows to build efficient R code in an incremental fashion. A good editor might even provide syntax highlighting, parenthesis matching, and a way to send a selected portion of code to R
![JSM 2011 [3]](http://xianblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/img_8479.jpg?w=270&h=360)
Monday August 01 was the first full day of JSM 2011 and full is the appropriate word to describe the day! It started for me at 7am with a round table run by Marc Suchard on parallel computing (or at 3am if I am considering the time I woke up!). I was rather out of 
One of the recurring frustrations in data analytics is that your data is never in the right shape. Worst case: you are not aware of this and every step you attempt is more expensive, less reliable and less informative than you would want. Best case: you notice this and have the tools to reshape your Related posts:
NppToR 2.6 is coming with improved flexibility and speed. Testers needed before setting as default.
What troubles me most about today’s environment is the persistent belief that crisis large or small results in a US dollar rally and lower Treasury rates. However, what happens if the US dollar and US Treasury rates are the source of the crisis? Then...
Ross Ikaha (via Xi'an -- thanks ;) ) gives a nice example to show why R is basically impossible to optimize:
> f = function() {
> if (runif(1) > 0.5) {
> x = 10
> }
> ...
I received an email from the Royal Statistical Society asking if I wanted to submit a 400-word discussion to the article, Vignettes and health systems responsiveness in cross-country comparative analyses by Nigel Rice, Silvana Robone and Peter C. Smith. My first thought was No, I can’t do it, I don’t know anything about health systems
The French agronomy research institute INRA is organising a Fall school in La Rochelle, Nov. 28 – Dec. 02, on Bayesian methods, oriented towards the applications in food sciences, environmental sciences, and biology. The provisional program (in French) is ■ Initiation aux outils informatiques R et WinBUGS (TP et réalisation de projets sur ordinateur) ■ 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
