This week it was revealed that the iPhone stores users’ locations, and this immediately caused a huge firestorm of commentary by tech geeks, panic among privacy advocates, and delight to data geeks like myself. Even better/worse, it seems that the iPhone caches location traces long-term, possibly back to the date the phone was activated.
I ditched my iPhone this past...
I spent some time this morning learning about how R thinks about dates in R. I found this website to be a useful guide.Imagine that your data are dates in a standard format and you want a vector o...
I spent some time this morning learning about how R thinks about dates in R. I found this website to be a useful guide.Imagine that your data are dates in a standard format and you want a vector o...
Earlier this week, data scientists Pete Warden and Alasdair Allen reported that iPhones and cell-enabled iPads keep an internal log of the devices location, which is accessible from the backup that iTunes creates when you sync the device. (Update Apr 27: Apple responds that the locations are those of nearby cell towers and wi-fi hotspots, not the device itself.)...
Another book I received from the Short Book Reviews section of the International Statistical Review is Everitt’s and Hothorn’s Handbook of statistical analyses using R. Here is a version of my book review. This book is the second (blue) edition of a successful (violet) handbook that can benefit a wide audience interested in using 
So I’ve been looking for some data to play with while learning R, other than the data I’m analysing for various experiments and papers I’m working on. I thought to myself, “Hey, this R stuff is pretty geeky. Can I engage in a higher level of geekiness?” And I think I’ve found a way: using
Yesterday Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden shocked the world by revealing that iPhones and iPads have been keeping track of our every move, and saving the data in obfuscated back up files. As my friend Vince Buffalo mentioned on Twitter, part of me was disgusted by the secret stalking Steve Jobs was doing, but my
So the web lit up a little today with news that iPhones are collecting time-stamped location data, and in a form that isn’t particularly hard to look at (and even with some nice apps to make animated maps of your travels etc): The database is SQLite, and I used R (and the RSQLite package) to
Here is a video tutorial where I go through some of the most commonly used commands in creating and manipulating data. As soon as I want to do more than just running a single regression, I use these commands more than any other set of commands (in som...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
