Ruby is well known for its terse syntax and ability to process web services. I prefer JSON (Javascript Object Notation) to XML whenever possible. For example, a script to retrieve a list of World Bank Data takes all of three lines of code (after in...
I really enjoyed all four talks at today's online conference, Making Data Work. (Disclosure: Revolution sponsored this conference.) I thought the four speakers together gave a great overview of issues related to the processing, analysis, and visualization of big data. Mike Driscoll started off with a useful categorization for data size. "Small Data" (<10Gb) fits in the memory of...
I was recently asked to review a soon to be published book on PostGIS, a spatial extension to the very popular Postgresql relational database. I was very excited about receiving an early copy of this book, as the authors have provided countless tips, ...
As promised a few posts ago, another demonstration of the excellent biomaRt package, this time in conjunction with GenomeGraphs. Here’s what we’re going to do: Grab some public microarray data Normalise and get a list of the most differentially-expressed probesets Use biomaRt to fetch the genes associated with those probesets Plot the data using GenomeGraphs 
Another unashamedly subjective book review - but first a little more about my history as it relates to R...A few years ago, I was doing some systems administration work at an industrial company for whom IT was a cost center. I wanted to illustrate to...
O'Reilly is hosting a conference on June 9 on the topic of the analysis of large data sets. The title of the conference is Making Data Work: Ever since Hal Varian proclaimed that data analysis is the sexy career for the coming decade, people have been talking about data. And big data. And even bigger data. This online conference,...
Over at The Book Blog, Tango has a post about standardizing Pitch F/X graphs to be catcher/batter/umpire view. While I don't think this should necessarily be the case for all Pitch F/X graphics, it brings up another issue that I've had with some graph...
The R software is very powerful and flexible but one of the complaints of new users is that the learning curve is steep and can be daunting. There have been various projects to create GUIs for R with varying levels of sophistication, one of which is R Commander by John Fox. Fast Tube by Casper This interface
The program of invited lectures, contributed talks and posters for this year's annual R user conference useR! 2010 is now available, and it looks to be another excellent event. (Revolution Analytics is a sponsor of useR! 2010.) Of note this year is an increasing focus on commercial applications of R, with no less than three multi-talk sessions on applications...
COUNTERINTUITIVE PROBLEM, INTUITIVE REPRESENTATION Blog posts about counterintuitive probability problems generate lots of opinions with a high probability. Andrew Gelman and readers have been having a lot of fun with the following probability problem: I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys? The
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
