Inspired by this tutorial, I thought that it would be nice to have the possibility to have access to weather forecast directly from the R command line, for example for a personalized start-up message such as the one below: Weather summary for Trieste,...
Google slightly changed the html code it uses for hyperlinks on search pages last Thursday, thus causing one of my scripts to stop working. Thankfully, this is easily solved in R thanks to the XML package and the power and simplicity of XPath expressions: Lovely jubbly! P.S. I know that there is an API of 
In Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database Source for R, I described a simple Google function for pulling data into R from a Google Visualization/Chart tools API query language query applied to a Google spreadsheet, given the spreadsheet key and worksheet ID. But how do you get a list of sheets in spreadsheet, without opening 
I recently heard about a new tool called Google Correlate that helps one finds Google search patterns that correspond to (i.e. correlate with) real-world trends.For those that don't get it yet, the tool allows one to type in a search term and the tool ...
It appears that just days ago, Google Tech Talk released a new, one hour long, video of a presentation (from June 6, 2011) made by one of R’s community more influential contributors, Hadley Wickham. This seems to be one of the better talks to send a programmer friend who is interested in getting into R.
Some years ago, Google discovered that when people are concerned about influenza, they search for flu-related information and that to some extent, search traffic is an indicator of flu activity. Google Flu Trends was born. Illness is sweeping through our department this week and I have succumbed. It’s not flu but at one point, I 
Gapminder is an independent foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Its mission is “to debunk devastating myths about the world by offering free access to a fact-based world view“. They provide free online tools, data (more than 400 datasets freely available!) and videos “to better understand the changing world“. The initial development of Gapminder was the 
A quick follow up to the previous post: about the the scores in the 2010 Google AI competition relative to programming language. The chart above makes each language visible and discrete - and the scales are the same.library(ggplot2)df<- read.c...
The Google AI Challenge recently wrapped up with a Lisp developer from Hungary as the winner. The competition challenges contestants to create bots that push the limits of AI and game theory. These bots compete against one another, and a co...
Since I got the chance to access to both Google Storage for Developers and Google Prediction API (more details here and here), I decided to create a simple wrapper (just 4 basic functions until now) to be capable to play with the Google Prediction API ...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
