## Global Temperature Proxy Reconstructions ~ Bayesian extrapolation of warming w/ rjags

August 22, 2010
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$Global Temperature Proxy Reconstructions ~ Bayesian extrapolation of warming w/ rjags$

Update: fixed projection. There are a bunch of “hockey sticks” that calculate past global temps. through the use of proxies when instrumental data is absent. There is a new one out there by McShane and Wyner (2010) that’s creating quite a stir in the blogosphere (here, here, here, here). The main take out being, that

## Dump R datasets into a single file

August 21, 2010
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Should you need datasets that come with R and additional packages (you can access them via data()) in one single file, here’s what I did to dump the entire workspace into one file: This code can easily be adapted to dump individual dataset into its own file.

## Using R for Introductory Statistics, Chapter 3.4

August 21, 2010
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...a continuing journey through Using R for Introductory Statistics, by John Verzani. Simple linear regression Linear regression is a kooky term for fitting a line to some data. This odd bit of terminology can be blamed on Sir Francis Galton, a proli...

## Using R for Introductory Statistics, Chapter 3.4

August 21, 2010
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...a continuing journey through Using R for Introductory Statistics, by John Verzani. Simple linear regression Linear regression is a kooky term for fitting a line to some data. This odd bit of terminology can be blamed on Sir Francis Galton, a proli...

## Map of Upcoming Ruby Conferences

August 21, 2010
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One of the top searches on rubyflow is “conference”.  A recent post showed how to create a map with the location of the 2010 R User Conference.  So why not expand on the subject and create a map with numerous conference locations thr...

## Managing Market Studies in R

August 21, 2010
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I'm currently working on seasonal studies for various markets and have decided it's high time I got an organized workflow established. How does sugar behave in August every year? Is it random or are there some fundamental drivers that coerce its behavi...

## swing graph

August 21, 2010
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I’m updating a swing dotplot PDF every 10 minutes as the count progresses (and the cool part is that the updates continue even as I’m flying Heathrow to SFO).

## Weekend art in R (Part 3)

August 21, 2010
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I have a few posts nearing completion, but meanwhile a weekend break for art. Big thanks to Simon Urbanek and Jeffrey Horner, creators of Cairo, a library for the programming language R. Have you noticed how R can’t anti-alias (fancy way for saying smooth out lines and curves when creating a bit-mapped image)? Cairo can.

## Using JAGS in R with the rjags Package

August 20, 2010
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Get Everything Set Up I’m going to assume that you have access to a machine that will run JAGS. If you don’t, then you should be able to use WinBUGS, which is very easy to get set up. Unfortunately, the details of what follows may not help you as much if you’re using WinBUGS. To

## Automatic Differentiation in R

August 20, 2010
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project outcomes —————- radx: forward automatic differentiation in R tada: templated automatic differentiation in C++ development summary ——————- During the summer of 2010, under the Google Summer of Code program, I was assigned the project of implementing an engine for Automatic Differentiation in R. The implementation involved building a fully functional system for computing numerical

## Taking R to the Limit, Part II – Large Datasets in R

August 20, 2010
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For Part I, Parallelism in R, click here. Tuesday night I again had the opportunity to present on high performance computing in R, at the Los Angeles R Users’ Group. This was the second part of a two part series called “Taking R to the Limit: High Performance Computing in R.” Part II discussed ways to work with large datasets...

## How extreme is the Russian heatwave?

August 20, 2010
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The devastating heatwave in Russia now seems to be over, but not before killing thousands, causing extensive wildfires, and destroying crops. But how severe was this heatwave, compared to past summers? Physicist and climate scientist Joe Wheatley looks at the record of temperature and rainfall in Russia over the last 60 years and places the last 3 months in...

## Phylogenetic trees online

August 20, 2010
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The other day, an article was published in PLoS One describing a newly developed JavaScript library to visualise phylogenetic trees online: jsPhyloSVG. It's pretty nifty, and there's some pretty cool functionality that you can build into the trees. It's all based on the PhyloXML standard for describing phylogenetic trees and networks, but can display trees...

## Phylogenetic trees online

August 20, 2010
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The other day, an article was published in PLoS One describing a newly developed JavaScript library to visualise phylogenetic trees online: jsPhyloSVG. It's pretty nifty, and there's some pretty cool functionality that you can build into the trees. It's all based on the PhyloXML standard for describing phylogenetic trees and networks, but can display trees...

## R courses from Statistics.com

August 19, 2010
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The fine folks at Statistics.com have a number of courses related to R coming up in the next few months, including what looks to be a very useful course in handling data with R from none other than R Core Team member Paul Murrell. The courses from Statistics.com are on-line, so you can participate on your own schedule and...

## Speeding up parentheses (and lots more) in R

August 19, 2010
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As I noted here, enclosing sub-expressions in parentheses is slower in R than enclosing them in curly brackets. I now know why, and I’ve modified R to reduce (but not eliminate) the slowness of parentheses. The modification speeds up many other operations in R as well, for an average speedup of something like 5% for

## A brief introduction to “apply” in R

August 19, 2010
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At any R Q&A site, you’ll frequently see an exchange like this one: Q: How can I use a loop to ? A: Don’t. Use one of the apply functions. So, what are these wondrous apply functions and how do they work? I think the best way to figure out anything in

## R/Rmetrics at BaselR

August 19, 2010
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August 18, 2010
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Last year there were over 2,600 murders in Ciudad Juarez, and if the more than 1,800 murders so far this year are any indications, there will be even more murders in 2010. Ciudad Juarez is a scary place, but it wasn't always that way... I learned from Noel Maurer's Blog that Ciudad Juarez used to have a low murder...

August 18, 2010
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Last year there were over 2,600 murders in Ciudad Juarez, and if the more than 1,800 murders so far this year are any indications, there will be even more murders in 2010. Ciudad Juarez is a scary place, but it wasn't always that way... I learned from Noel Maurer's Blog that Ciudad Juarez used to have a low murder...

## Integrating PHP and R

August 18, 2010
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“How can I integrate PHP and R?” I know I’m not the only one who’s asked this question. After all, with great content management systems like Drupal, it would very cool to be able to drop an R module into some PHP code and instantly have a web app popping out some snazzy looking ggplot

## New R User Group in Raleigh-Durham

August 18, 2010
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New local R user groups keep on popping up on a regular basis, which is great to see. The latest one is deep in SAS territory: it's the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill R Users Group in They don't have any meetings scheduled just yet (but when they do their gracious meetup hosts are Carrboro Creative Coworking). So if you're in the...

## R be dragons

August 18, 2010
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Hic sunt dracones used to be placed on maps, as a way to denote a dangerous or otherwise unexplored territory. We might as well write it all over R-related material used in introductory classes, because students seems to be really (…)Read the rest of this entry »

## Distributions in R

August 18, 2010
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One of the R language's most powerful features is its ability to deal with random distributions: not just generating random numbers from various distributions (based on a very powerful pseudo-random number generator), but also calculating densities, probabilities, and quintiles. John Cook provides a handy reference chart listing all of the distributions supported by standard R (reproduced below -- and...

## Bookshelf remodelling

August 18, 2010
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I found time and read Gelman and Hill’s “Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel / Hierarchical Models“…Now, please do yourself a favour and get it (of course the paperback version ;)). Even for experienced or intermediate (myself) this will be a treat for your eyes and neurons. PS : (Confession) I didn’t like the Bayesian

## Bookshelf remodelling

August 18, 2010
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I found time and read Gelman and Hill’s “Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel / Hierarchical Models“…Now, please do yourself a favour and get it (of course the paperback version ). Even for experienced or intermediate (myself) this will be a treat for your eyes and neurons. PS : (Confession) I didn’t like the Bayesian ...read more

## Twifficiency Scores

August 18, 2010
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Neil Kodner wrote a great post this morning about yesterday’s Twifficiency scores outbreak. He grabbed all the auto-tweeted scores he could find and plotted their distribution. I was struck by the asymmetry of the resulting distribution, which you can see below: Thankfully, Neil handed me the raw data for his plot, so I was able

## state-by-state pendulum

August 17, 2010
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By popular demand (!), my state-by-state pendulum (pendula?) for 2010 is up (big PDF), just in time for the election.  550px wide JPG version is inline, below. This follows the same formatting I used in the 2007 edition. We start with the 2PP ALP vote shares recorded at the last election (incorporating changes from electoral