Articles by Assorted things

Building a search page over large documente dataset based in elasticsearch

June 7, 2020 | Assorted things

During these weeks of lockdown everyone in data science has been looking for some dataset to play around. In my particular case I found ParlSpeech V2 1. ParlSpeech V2 contains complete full-text vectors of more than 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, ... [Read more...]

Using R to solve old solitaire

January 22, 2020 | Assorted things

There is an old solitaire I started to play when I was in high school, when classes became too boring. I don’t know if it has a name or if I invited it ex nihilo. These are the rules: It begins with an empty 10x10 matrix Write a 1 where ...

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How tennis has changed over time

August 27, 2019 | Assorted things

During the last years I have become a huge fan of tennis (both, on court and in TV). This year I followed (in TV) with attention Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Although clay and grass are very different surfaces I’ve found the game very similar. What happened with the serve-volley ...

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Are pollen forecast good enough?

February 13, 2019 | Assorted things

Introduction Maybe some of you (in my huge audience) have the bad luck of being allergic to pollen like myself. Since mid-January to the end of June I have to live very close to my antihistamines. Here in Madrid where I live health authorities issue newsletters (by email) with observations ...

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Developing a package to analyze data of the hospital morbidity survey

October 19, 2018 | Assorted things

Introduction This post is going to be the most ambitious one so far. Months ago I decided to develope a R package from scratch to learn a little about the process. So I dug up some code I wrote and I got to the work. And of course, for a ...

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Text mining in R. A different approach to The Iliad

October 15, 2018 | Assorted things

Introduction This project is an attempt to get familiarity with text mining in R and I haven’t found a better way to get it that mining The Iliad. This familiarity with text mining can be very useful because “much of the data proliferating today is unstructured and text-heavy.”1 I’...

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One tweet leads to some R work about births

October 4, 2018 | Assorted things

This new post was born because of my curiosity about this tweet: Italy 1960-2014: Big drop in annual number of births, big increase in ages of mothers. #Italy #fertility pic.twitter.com/QGT0AnA3IU — Carl Schmertmann (@CSchmert) 7 de febrero de 2018 Sometimes you just feel the urge to recreate some ...

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Funny facts about borrowed stuff in Madrid public libraries

October 2, 2018 | Assorted things

As a regular user of Madrid public libraries I’m glad of having found data about borrowed stuff. So let’s take a look at it and answer a couple of questions. Miguel de Cervantes Prize is one of the most richest literary prizes and the most prestigious of the ... [Read more...]

Scrapping BOE in search of post election designations

September 25, 2018 | Assorted things

Anyone with little contact with spanish adminstration, or just with interest in politics, knows that after a major change in the party ruling the goverment goes an important amount of dessignations in the highest levels of administration. I want to quantify this by counting the dessignations and cessations published in ...