Articles by Drew Conway

Code for Machine Learning for Hackers

February 16, 2012 | Drew Conway

With the release of the eBook version of Machine Learning for Hackers this week, many people have been asking for the code. With good reason—as it turns out—because O’Reilly still (at the time of this writing) has not updated the book page to include a link to ... [Read more...]

A year of Chicago’s crime, in 30 seconds

June 21, 2011 | Drew Conway

Yesterday Brett Goldstein, the Chief Data Officer for the City of Chicago, announced on Twitter the release of Chicago’s crime data for the past year. The data is very detailed, and wonderful resource for criminologist and social scientists alike. I have been playing around with the data a bit, ... [Read more...]

EC2 AMI for scientific computing in Python and R

April 11, 2011 | Drew Conway

Like many people who crunch numbers frequently, I have increasingly been integrating Amazon’s cloud computing services into my daily workflow. In particular, I have been using their elastic cloud computing (EC2) on a regular basis. The service is an excellent way to offload computationally intensive work from your laptop ... [Read more...]

Happy Pi Day, Now Go Estimate It!

March 14, 2011 | Drew Conway

As you may know, today is Pi Day, when all good nerds take a moment to thank the geeks of antiquity for their painstaking work in estimating this marvelous mathematical constant. It is also a great opportunity to thank contemporary geeks for the wonders of modern computing, which allow us ... [Read more...]

Language used by Academics with the Protection of Anonymity

March 14, 2011 | Drew Conway

Those in the political science discipline probably remember their first encounter with poliscijobrumors.com. For those outside, you have probably never heard of this particular message board, and you would have no reason to. As the URL suggests, the board specializes in rumor, gossip, back-bitting, mudslinging, and the occasional lucid ... [Read more...]

Top 15 Daily Tweeters of #25bahman for the Past Five Days

February 16, 2011 | Drew Conway

My friend Michael Bommarito has been doing the data community quite a service, capturing and sharing all of the traffic on Twitter related to the Iranian protests. Specifically, he has all of the tweets containing the #25bahman hast-tag, and made them available for anyone to download. I am unable to ... [Read more...]

Building a Better Word Cloud

January 27, 2011 | Drew Conway

A few weeks ago I attended the NYC Data Visualization and Infographics meetup, which included a talk by Junk Charts blogger Kaiser Fung. Given the topic of his blog, I was a bit shocked that the central theme of his talk was comparing good and bad word clouds. He even ...
[Read more...]

A Very Data Christmas

December 21, 2010 | Drew Conway

This week Google announced its Ngram Viewer, which allows you to explore the use of words in thousands of texts overtime, going back two hundred years. Given the relatively long time period covered by this massive data set, it is fun to explore how language has changed overtime. Some texts, ...
[Read more...]

Jeromy Anglim on Reproducible Research and R

December 6, 2010 | Drew Conway

Jeromy Anglim, fellow social scientist and R aficionado from across the globe, gave a great talk to the Melbourne R Users Group last week on the joys of creating reproducible results. A subject near and dear to me, but not one that is given enough attention in research training. Jeromy ... [Read more...]

Fun with infochimps: Animated Blog Post Hit Map

December 3, 2010 | Drew Conway

In a few weeks I will be visiting Chicago, and JD Long—the organizer of the local R users group—has graciously invited me to give a presentation. Ostensibly, the presentation will be on my recently released infochimps package, so I thought it was a good time to start actually ... [Read more...]

My First R Package: infochimps

November 20, 2010 | Drew Conway

I have finally taken the plunge and created my first R package! As frequent readers will know, I often sing the praises of infochimps, a startup out of Austin, TX attempting to be the world’s data clearinghouse. While infochimps is an excellent resource for data sets, they also provide ... [Read more...]

Co-authorship Network of SSRN Conflict Studies eJournal

November 10, 2010 | Drew Conway

As part of my on-going research simulating network structure using graph motifs I have been collecting novel data sets to test and benchmark the method. Since I am a political scientist studying conflict, it was suggested to me to collect a co-authorship network within this sub-discipline. Such a network is ... [Read more...]

Where People Share Links About NYC

October 27, 2010 | Drew Conway

Last week I participated in bit.ly’s fourth hackabit hack-a-thon, which is a wonderful opportunity for NYC area hackers to get together, eat pizza, drink energy drinks, and stay up late hacking with some of the best data geeks around. I was lucky enough to saddle up next to ...
[Read more...]
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