Last weekend, my friend and coauthor Jean-Michel Marin was interviewed (as Jean-Claude Marin, sic!) by a national radio about the probability of the replication of a draw on the Israeli Lottery. Twice the same series of numbers appeared within a month. This lotery operates on a principle of 6/37 + 1/8: 6 numbers are drawn 
In his august draft of Hansen2010, Dr. Hansen makes the following claim: “We present evidence here that the urban warming has little effect on our standard global temperature analysis. However, in the Appendix we carry out an even more rigorous test. We show there that there are a sufficient number of stations located in “pitch 
U.S. Congressional districts are today drawn with the aim of maximizing the electoral advantage of the state’s majority party, subject to some constraints, including compactness (which can be measured in numerous ways) and a “one person, one vote” standard. What if, instead of minimizing population variance across districts, we aimed to minimize the mean distance between … Read more
The winners of this year's ggplot2 case study competition have been announced. I was honoured to be asked to be a judge of the competition this year, but it was a difficult job with so many excellent entries. In the end, the judging panel (which included Heike Hoffman and Hadley Wickham and me) selected three entries which each demonstrated...
In part 1 and part 2 we went over the background of nightlights and the fundamental problem: Station inventory data had errors in it: In Hansen 2010, Hansen writes: “ Station location in the meteorological data records is provided with a resolution of 0.01 degrees of latitude and longitude, corresponding to a distance of about 1 
The 2010 ggplot2 Case Study Competition Winners have been announced! Congratulations to the winners!Grand Prize: David Kahle, Rice UniversityFinalist: Michael Lavine, UMass Amherst Finalist: Claudia Beleites, TU Dresden & Uni....
The 2010 ggplot2 Case Study Competition Winners have been announced! Congratulations to the winners!Grand Prize: David Kahle, Rice UniversityFinalist: Michael Lavine, UMass Amherst Finalist: Claudia Beleites, TU Dresden & Uni....
In part 1 we discussed UHI in a general way and introduced NASA’s use of nightlights to identify Rural, periurban and Urban stations. Very simply, the latitude and longitude data in the station inventory is used to look up at radiance value in the nightlights file. If that value is 10 or less, the site 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
