Page 7 of Facebook's 213-page S-1 filing for their record-breaking IPO includes the following chart, under the headline: "Our Mission: To make the world more open and connected". This chart was created using the R language and Hadoop by Facebook intern Paul Butler. (Thanks to the blog IOER Tools for first noticing the inclusion...
Posts Tagged ‘ current events ’
NYT uses R to map the 1%
Last Saturday, the New York Times published a feature article on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. The on-line version of the article included interactive features like this interactive map showing where your household ranks in the country and in local regions. The print edition, however, included some different (and necessarily static) representations of US...
Mapping the Iowa caucus results: how it’s done with R
If you've been following the presidential primary process here in the US, you've probably seen many maps of the results of the Iowa caucuses by now (such as this infamous one from Fox News). But you might be interested to learn how such maps can be made using the R language. The Offensive Politics...
Propagation of the news of OBL’s death via Twitter
SocialFlow's blog has a great case study today on how news from a single tweet -- in this case, speculation made an hour before the President's announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed -- can propagate through social networks. At 10:24 p.m. EST on Sunday May 1, Keith Urbahn tweeted: "So I'm told...
How to load your iPhone location data into R
Earlier this week, data scientists Pete Warden and Alasdair Allen reported that iPhones and cell-enabled iPads keep an internal log of the devices location, which is accessible from the backup that iTunes creates when you sync the device. (Update Apr 27: Apple responds that the locations are those of nearby cell towers and wi-fi...
Visualizing tax brackets
With Tax Day fast approaching here in the US, there's been a lot of discussion about tax policy and in particular the tax rates paid by the highest income earners. Like in many countries, here the income tax system is bracketed: Tax Bracket Single Married Filing Jointly 10% Bracket $0 – $8,375 $0 –...
The Egyptian Revolution, in tweets
Twitter played a significant role in the recent uprising in Egypt, with protesters communicating via tweets marked with the #25bahman hastag (February 14 in the arabic calendar) to plan and rally for the demonstration. Michael Bommarito downloaded all such tweets and plotted their frequency over time using R's ggplot2 library: Not surprisingly, the activity...
Airport security: science vs backlash
The United States has recently introduced millimeter wave and backscatter x-ray scanners to the security screening process in many airports, prompting a backlash in some quarters. Much of the opposition is centered around the invasion of privacy: the scanners generate an image of the traveller's naked body. There are also health concerns, at least...
The stimulus, mapped
Edward Tufte created this "Lights-On Map", animating the grants under the American Recovery and Investment Act (more commonly known as the Stimulus): Click the image to see the lights come on over time. It's a nice visualization of the distribution of the stimulus projects over the country and time, but I'm actually surprised that...
How extreme is the Russian heatwave?
The devastating heatwave in Russia now seems to be over, but not before killing thousands, causing extensive wildfires, and destroying crops. But how severe was this heatwave, compared to past summers? Physicist and climate scientist Joe Wheatley looks at the record of temperature and rainfall in Russia over the last 60 years and places...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).