I am a regular reader of the FlowingData blog by Nathan Yau. It is an excellent reference for anyone interested in statistical visualization of data. One of his posts that caught my attention was a visualization of the growth of Walmart in the US. Given my research interests in retail, it was a fascinating insight 
Catching up on roundups today. February roundup will follow soon, but in the meantime enjoy this trip down memory lane - DS. In case you missed them, here are some articles from January of particular interest to R users. Revolution Analytics is now offering annual sponsorship grants for local R user groups worldwide. Issue 2 of the R Journal...
Buried in the London Datastore are the population estimates for each of the London Boroughs between 2001 – 2030. They predict a declining population for most boroughs with the exception of a few to the east. I was surprised by this general decline and also the numbers involved- I expected larger changes from one year to ...
Valentine's day is a nice opportunity to post on hot and sexy topics... Well, it's also an important day that I should not miss, probably as much as Saint Patrick's my wife's birthday. And as I mentioned last week (here), it is difficult to get the...
Today I unveil my very first statistical YouTube video! I will do anything to keep you statisfied, and if that means YouTube, then so be it. But first, some exposition: In Panama, 10 percent of the population owned 45 percent of the income in 2000, whereas the bottom 10 percent owned only 0.6 percent. How 
We think of accidents as abnormal events, but there is “normal accident” theory. We don’t think of accidents happening in markets, but they do. That’s why it’s called a market crash. For normal accidents to come into play, two conditions need to hold: the system is complex the system is tightly coupled Certainly the financial … Continue reading...
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, and to put the scale of the event in context San Francisco bureau chief for New Scientist magazine and data journalist Peter Aldhous created a time-lapse animation of all large earthquakes in the last year, beginning with the 7.0-magnitude Haiti event. Peter used USGS data, R and Flash to generate...
How many gifts did my true love give to me on all twelve nights of Christmas?
After seeing Information is Beautiful’s recent information animation, I decided that I’d make my own.
I used R to generate a PDF and then did a screencast of the PDF with ffmpeg to make a video with the appropriate timings. The code for the PDF...
R’s default theme of the HTML help pages is too plain for me to read, but we can easily modify the theme, which is essentially a CSS file. You can find the file under: file.path(R.home('doc'), 'html', 'R.css') Simply replace this file with my version: which looks like: Of course you can design your own R.css
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
formatR update (0.1-6)
A new version of the formatR package is available on CRAN now (binary packages are still on the way). There are three major updates: the inline comments will also be preserved in most cases (in earlier versions, only single lines of comments are preserved) tidy.source() gained a new argument 'text' to accept a character vector
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