Things have been a bit quiet at Quantum Forest during the last ten days. Last Monday (Sunday for most readers) I flew to Australia to attend a couple of one-day workshops; one on spatial analysis (in Sydney) and another one … Continue reading →
Things have been a bit quiet at Quantum Forest during the last ten days. Last Monday (Sunday for most readers) I flew to Australia to attend a couple of one-day workshops; one on spatial analysis (in Sydney) and another one … Continue reading →
A recent provisional data release from the Ministry of Justice contains sentencing data from English(?) courts, at the offence level, for the period July 2010-June 2011: “Published for the first time every sentence handed down at each court in the country between July 2010 and June 2011, along with the age and ethnicity of each 
Which text editor do you use? Once in a while this question pops up on the R-help mailing list. Up until recently I used the KDE text editor Kate under Linux. Recently, I came across a new text editor for…
I bought an Android phone, nothing fancy just my first foray in the smartphone world, which is a big change coming from the dumb phone world(*). Everything is different and I am back at being a newbie; this is what … Continue reading →
If part of the role of data journalism is to make transparent the justification behind claims that are, or aren’t, backed up by data, there’s good reason to suppose that the journalists should be able to back up their own data-based claims with evidence about how they made use of the data. Posting links to 
Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe a quick way of analysing 
With R 2.14 slated to be released next week we wanted to encourage everyone planning to upgrade to also update to the latest release of RStudio (v0.94.110). For R 2.14 users this release includes tweaks related to compatibility with the R 2.14 graphics engine as well as compatibility with the new parallel package. There are 