What is Rook?Rook is a web server interface for R, written by Jeffrey Horner, the author of rApache and brew. But unlike other web frameworks for R, such as brew, R.rsp (which I have used in the past1), Rserve, gWidgetWWWW or sumo (which I haven't used...

It is less than a week before the 2012 Olympic games will start in London. No surprise therefore that the papers are all over it, including a lot of data and statistis around the games. The Economist investigated the potential financial impact on spons...

The other day I saw a fantastic exhibition of work by Bridget Riley. Karsten Schubert, who is Riley's main agent, has a some of her most famous and influential artwork from 1960 - 1966 on display, including the seminal Moving Squares from 1961.Photo of...

The second Cologne R user meeting took place last Friday, 6 July 2012, at the Institute of Sociology. Thanks to Bernd Weiß, who provided the meeting room, we didn't have to worry about the infrastructure, like we did at our first gathering. Again, we ...

At the R in Finance conference Paul Teetor gave a fantastic talk about Fast(er) R Code. Paul mentioned the common higher-order function Reduce, which I hadn't used before. Reduce allows me to apply a function successively over a vector. What does that...

This post is a quick reminder that the next Cologne R user group meeting is only one week away. We will meet on 6 July 2012. The meeting will kick off at 18:00 with three short talks at the Institute of Sociology and will continue, even more informal, ...

One of the great research papers of the 20th century celebrates its 60th anniversary in a few weeks time: A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. Only a...

This evening I will talk about Dynamical systems in R with simecol at the LondonR meeting. Thanks to the work by Thomas Petzoldt, Karsten Rinke, Karline Soetaert and R. Woodrow Setzer it is really straight forward to model and analyse dynamical systems...

Transforming data sets with R is usually the starting point of my data analysis work. Here is a scenario which comes up from time to time: transform subsets of a data frame, based on context given in one or a combination of columns.As an example I use ...

A new version of googleVis has been released on CRAN and the project site. Version 0.2.16 adds the functionality to plot quarterly and monthly data as a motion chart. To illustrate the new feature I looked for a quarterly data set and stumbled across t...

Tonight I will give a talk at the Cambridge R user group about googleVis. Following my good experience with knitr and RStudio to create interactive reports, I thought that I should try to create the slides in the same way as well. Christopher Gandrud's...

John D. Cook gave a great talk about 'Why and how people use R'. The talk resonated with me and highlighted why R is such a great tool for end user computing. A topic which has become increasingly important in the European insurance industry.John's mai...

Last Saturday I met the guys from RStudio at the R in Finance conference in Chicago. I was curious to find out what RStudio could offer. In the past I have used mostly Emacs + ESS for editing R files. Well, and what a surprise it was. JJ, Joe and Josh ...

Waterfall charts are sometimes quite helpful to illustrate the various moving parts in financial data, in particular where I have positive and negative values like a profit and loss statement (P&L). However, they can be a bit of a pain to produce in Ex...

The next Cologne R user group meeting is scheduled for 6 July 2012. All details are available on the new KölnRUG Meetup site. Please sign up if you would like to come along, and notice that there is also pub poll for the after "work" drinks. Notes fr...

Is there a life outside the office?Photo: Markus GesmannIt is not unusual that you will not have admin rights in an IT controlled office environment. But then again the limitations set by the IT department can spark of some creativity. And I have to ad...

The Guardian published a nice summary and link collection of an interdisciplinary visualisation workshop hosted by Microsoft dedicated to visualising probability and risk. Check it out here.OECD better life indexThe links I found most interesting were ...

How do you apply one particular row of your data to all other rows?Today I came across a data set which showed the revenue split by product and location. The data was formated to show only the split by product for each location and the overall split by...

The first Kölner R user meeting was great fun. About 20 useRs had turned up to exchange their ideas, questions and experience with R. Three talks about R & Excel, ggplot2 & XeLaTeX and Dynamical systems with R & simecol had kicked off the evening, wit...

Venue: Sion em Keldenich, Weyertal 47, 50937 Cologne, Germany, 6 p.m., 30 March 2012, View Larger MapFor more details and registration see the Kölner R User Group page.