Earlier today, I saw a post vis the aggregating R-Bloggers service a post on Using Text Mining to Find Out What @RDataMining Tweets are About. The post provides a walktrhough of how to grab tweets into an R session using the twitteR library, and then do some text mining on it. I’ve been meaning to 
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 
So you want to get statistical? Nowadays one of the ways to go is to use R, mostly in combination with ggplot2 for generating the plots. These plots and graphs however need some data, for that we use data sources. There are a lot of data sources availa...
![Software for Research, Part 3: [R], RStudio and ggplot2 for Statistics](http://f.giorlando.org/user/sites/giorlando.org/files/clip/InternetDiscussion_pop.png)
is an excellent open-source statistics language. It's cross-platform and free and I think it will eventually displace proprietary stat's packages due to its rapid development, speed and ease of use. So there's no time like the present to get used...
I once heard John Chambers (the inventor of the S language, and member of the R Core Group) say, "Show me a programming language no-one complains about, and I'll show you a language no-one uses". The R language has its fair share of complainants, to be sure -- and that's to be expected for a language with more than...
Update 10/11/2011: There’s a good discussion on RedditUpdate 10/12/2011: Note manipulate package and highlight data.table packageThe R statistical computing platform is a rising star that’s been gaining popularity and attention, but it gets no respect in the hood. It’s telling that a popular guide to R is called The R Inferno, and that advocacy pieces
I couldn’t contain myself (other more pressing things to do, but…), so I just took a quick time out and a coffee to put together a quick and dirty R function that will let me run queries over Google spreadsheet data sources and essentially treat them as database tables (e.g. Using Google Spreadsheets as a 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
