There has been some discussion about whether Google Scholar or one of the proprietary software companies numbers are better for citation counts. I personally think Google Scholar is better for a number of reasons: Higher numbers, but consistently/a... [Read more...]

We’re hosting the international useR! conference at Warwick this summer, and I thought it might be interesting to try to get some data on how the use of R is growing. I decided to look at scholarly citations to R, mainly because I know where to f... [Read more...]

In this, Chomsky is in complete agreement with O’Reilly. (I recognize that the previous sentence would have an extremely low probability in a probabilistic model trained on a newspaper or TV corpus.)1 Anyone who considers themself an intellectual should be required to read this new essay by Peter Norvig. ... [Read more...]

The Bayesian-Frequentist debate reflects two different attitudes to the process of doing science, both quite legitimate. Bayesian statistics is well-suited to individual researchers, or a research group, trying to use all the information at its disposal to make the quickest possible progress. In pursuing progress, Bayesians tend to be aggressive ... [Read more...]