The ability to handle maps and geospatial images is always a nice trick to have up your sleeve. Almost any sizeable report will contain a map – of a locality, of a country, or of the world. However, very few analysts have the ability to produce these plots for themselves and ... [Read more...]

In searching for some information on web-scrapers, I found a great presentation given at Pycon in 2010 by Asheesh Laroia. I thought this might be a valuable resource for R users who are looking for ways to gather data from user-unfriendly websites. The... [Read more...]

Today I had one of those special moments that is uniquely associated with R. One of my colleagues was trying to solve what I term an 'Excel problem'. That is, one where the problem magically disappears once a programming language is employed. Put simpl... [Read more...]

Today, in one of my more productive days, I managed to create a sleek R script that plotted several histograms in a lattice, allowing for easy identification of the underlying trend. Although the majority of the time taken consisted of collecting the data and making various adjustments, it took a ... [Read more...]

I suffer a little from the age-old affliction of contrarianism. If a software package is used by the majority of the population, I assume it is flawed, highly limited, and its continued use will ultimately result in the downfall of the human race. Conversely, I am always extremely interested in ... [Read more...]