Here are my slides from a short introductory seminar on R (essentially going through part I of the R tutorial) last week. As magic lantern pictures go, they’re hideously ugly, but they were mostly there for future reference. Most of the seminar was spent showing RStudio. This Friday, we’ll practice some uses of qplot and make 
Our 5th Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended meeting so far, with 20 members finding their way to the Institute of Sociology for two talks by Diego de Castillo on shiny and Stephan Holtmeier on cluster analysis, followed by beer and schnitzel at the Lux, a gastropub nearby.
Last year I sat on a couple of panels organised by I’m a Scientist’s Shane McCracken at various science communication conferences. A couple of days ago, I noticed Shane had popped up a post asking Who are you Twitter?, a quick review of a social media mapping exercise carried out on the followers of the 
In fact, I’m going there with my family and some friends, including two probabilists (I mean professionals, I am merely an amateur), with this incredible challenge: will I be able to convince probabilists to go to play at the Casino? Actually, I also want to study them carefully, to understand how we should play optimally. For example, I hope...
Since I have not posted in quite a while, I wanted to let everyone know that I am still alive and kicking. The resurrection of excitement (opportunity) in the markets, quarterly reporting cycle, and the overwhelming number of unbelievable R/javascript releases have kept me from writing something good enough to justify a post. In the markets, Japan and gold...
As if the London Whale nearly bankrupting Chase Bank wasn't lesson enough, we now hear that an Excel error impacted the conclusions of a major economics paper that influenced the recent austerity policies in the US, UK and elsewhere. Matt Frost says enough is enough, and implores to everyone to stop using error-prone point-and-click tools, and instead use a...
You may have already seen a lot written on the replication of Reinhart & Rogoff’s (R & R) much cited 2010 paper done by Herndon, Ash, and Pollin. If you haven’t, here is a round up of some of some of what has been written: Konczal, Yglesias, Krugman, Cowen, Peng,
‘No estaba muerto, andaba the parranda’† as the song says. Although rather than partying it mostly has been reading, taking pictures and trying to learn how to record sounds. Here there are some things I’ve come across lately. I can’t … Continue reading →
For reasons beyond my understanding, the user 2013 committee didn’t register a domain name for the website, and the official address of the conference is: http://161.67.142.97/congresos/useR-2013/. Not only is this impossible to remember for humans, but it won’t show up in search engines. So I decided to help them out and invest 8 euro to ...
If you're creating a scientific graphic in the R language, there's a good chance you'll be wanting to include some mathematical symbols somewhere on the chart. You might want to use a symbol like μ as an axis label, annotate a curve with simple math like x2, or even put a complete equation like: in the title. You can...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
