Did you wake up this morning hoping that you would be able to listen to telephone beeps inspired by Estonian web site metrics? I knew you did! First things first: I came up with the slightly crazy idea of using the bleepy sounds that telephones make, called “dual-tone multifrequency” (DTMF) tones, as a tool in 
I’m in the process of buying a used car. Since I enjoy making these decisions as complicated as possible, I’ve written some R code to scrape relevant websites for informative data. I’ve written this up as a blog entry because I think it’s a decent example of how one might use the XML...
As I am working on my dissertation and piecing together a mess of notes, code and output, I am wondering to myself “how long is this thing supposed to be?” I am definitely not into this to win the prize for longest dissertation. I just want to say my piece, make my point and move on. I’ve heard that...
Cricket World Cup 2011 is approaching and I'm interested in analyzing one day international cricket data to predict some results and share interesting information about cricket. For the analysis, I need cricket data and tried several things to ge...
A while back I posted something about scraping a webpage using the BeautifulSoup module in Python. One of the comments to that post was by Larry — a blogger over at IEORTools — suggesting that I take a look at … Continue reading →
Plenty of people have been scraping data from the web using R for a while now, but I just completed my first project and I wanted to share the code with you. It was a little hard to work through some of the “issues”, but I had some great help from @DataJunkie on twitter. As 
On July 29, 2010, I had a flight from Denver to Cincinnati. About an hour before boarding, I went to ESPN’s website and found a new article by Bill Simmons, a.k.a The Sports Guy (@sportsguy33 on Twitter). The basic premise of this article is that a core group of fans is losing interest in Red 
After the recent foray into stock analysis using quantmod, I thought it worthwhile to mention that the library can be used to analyze a wide variety of investments, including precious metals. It is also worthwhile to mention that there are other ...
In 2007, I was introduced to Twitter via the written qualifying exam towards my Ph.D.. At first, I did not know what to do with it. After a good year or so (maybe even sooner) passed, I began to follow some very interesting people that share the same interests as me. It has transformed my academic experience. It is...
At Doug Rivers’ suggestion, I started investigating tooltips as a way to label points in R graphs. An example appears at the top of my blog, where I plot the ideal points (revealed preferences) of the (current) 111th U.S. House of Representatives against Obama vote share in their district in 2008 (SVG). I’m using the
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
