Yesterday the topic of academic citation counts came up, so I decided that I should write up some tools for exploring cite counts. The first thing I did was to build a cheap screenscraper in Ruby for pulling citation count information from Google schol... [Read more...]

We have started to look into kdb+ as a possible high-performance column-store backend. Kx offers free trials -- and so I have played with this for a day or two, both the general system, data loads and dumps and in particular with the interface to R, Based on the few ... [Read more...]

R can legitimately be called both a programming language and a statistical package. Many books address both the programming and statistical components of R, but invariably the discussion of statistical topics is more detailed than the discussion of pr... [Read more...]

One of my ongoing annoyances with Microsoft Word is its inability to handle figures in a consistent way. The last quirk I discovered is the following: if you group a figure with a textbox -- something often done for creating captions -- the print quali... [Read more...]

Title: A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using RAuthor(s): Brian S. Torvitt; Torsten HothornPublisher/Date: Chapman & Hall/2006Statistics level: Intermediate to advancedProgramming level: Intermediate Overall recommendation: Highly recommended ... [Read more...]

A few weeks ago, we finished a paper that surveys the current state of parallel computing with R. The paper was lead by Markus Schmidberger and written while he was visiting the [Read more...]

I did not know this and had to spend the whole week to figure out what's wrong with my code. I was updating the mi package. While I was doing code checking procedure, I always got a error message that I did not know what was going on. I remember ... [Read more...]

These interactive graphics are simply beautiful. And they just so happen to be profoundly informative about the structure of modern science as well. Here’s to the hope that we will see more work from Moritz Stefaner soon that shows how our aesthetic ... [Read more...]

Just when I am about to convert myself into a Linux user, I found this. Running R in the command mode in the Window system is much faster. Here is a simple test:in the Window interface:__ system.time(rnorm(1000000)%*%rnorm(1000000)) user system elapsed 1.06 0.05 1.14 in the command mode__ system.time(... [Read more...]

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I abuse Adobe InDesign sometimes for creating artwork, for instance to make gant diagrams. Usually, I do not want to export a complete page to pdf in those cases, but only the boxes and text that’s going to make up the illustration. Automaticatio... [Read more...]

When creating graphs, we're usually most concerned with what happens near the center of our displays, as this is where most of the important information is generally held. But sometimes, either for aesthetics or clarity, we want to adjust what's outsi... [Read more...]

A while back, I suggested to Achim to add a new CRAN Task View for High Performance Computing with R. And as of a day or two ago, we now have the new CRAN Task View for High Performance Computing with R providing an overview about available packages, grouped thematically, ... [Read more...]

Title: Data Analysis and Graphics Using R: An Example-Based ApproachAuthor(s): John Maindonald; John BraunPublisher/Date: Cambridge University Press/2003Statistics level: Intermediate to advancedProgramming level: Beginner to intermediate Overall recom... [Read more...]

Originally posted on r-sig-jobs listserv: Hello All, We are in ned of an R programmer for a project in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We need the person to be local as the project involves coordination of a series of experts. The project is only about 150... [Read more...]

JAGS was developed to help those non-Window users to be able to use BUGS. However, I found it is very hard to install JAGS and its R package-rjags. Here is my note on how to install JAGS and rjags in Fedora 10. The note here should work for all Linu... [Read more...]

Today I will treat a problem I encounter every once in a while. Let’s suppose we have several dataframes or vectors of unequel length but with partly matching column names,  just like the following ones: df1 [Read more...]

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Originally posted on r-sig-jobs listserv: Hello, Might be interesting for some of you: Bioinformatician / Data Analyst Grade: 5 or 6, depending on experience EMBL site: EMBL Heidelberg Commencing date: As sooon as possible, after closing date (28 February 2009) read more [Read more...]

Originally posted on r-sig-jobs listserv: *Postdoc Position Computational Systems Biology 'Systems Bioinformatics: Computational Modelling Methods' f/m * * VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands * *Research project * read more [Read more...]