If you’re like me, you love ipython notebook but often write R.  RStudio’s integrated RMarkdown is nice, but for some contexts like quick demos or basic training, a browser-based interface is unbeatable.  What if we could get the best of… Read more › [Read more...]

  Last week, I shared that Dan Katz and I had finally published a draft of our paper, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The U.S. Code.  We’d previewed this research on Computational Legal Studies years ago.  Since then, we’ve received great… Read more › [Read more...]

  Throughput, throughput, throughput – for many databases, this is the performance measure of importance.  When you are working with a fixed number of IOPS but see mixed workload types, system health can be assessed through the average read and…Read more › [Read more...]

  How long does your Oracle RMAN backup take to complete?  How does this vary over time?  Are there patterns by week, week of month, or day of week?   The gist below can help you evaluate questions like these.… Read more › [Read more...]

  Back in 2011, I covered the relative performance difference of the most popular libraries for text processing in R and Python.   In case you can’t guess the answer, Python and NLTK  won by a significant margin over R and… Read more › [Read more...]

In many circumstances, you might want to connect R directly to a database to store and retrieve data.  If the source database is an Oracle database, you have a number of options: ROracle RODBC RJDBC   Using ROracle should theoretically… Read more › [Read more...]

  Much of my time lately has gone into analyzing and trading products in the volatility complex.  As a result, I regularly watch the VIX term structure for continuations or deviations from trend.  To make analysis simpler, I’ve written some… Read more › [Read more...]

Did you find this post useful?  Does your organization need Oracle services?  We can help.   Much of this morning went into investigating strange ADDM reports on a two-node Oracle RAC database.  For some reason, there were statistically improbable differences…Read more › [Read more...]

Here’s one purely for fun – a wordcloud built from the Supreme Court’s opinion on Arizona et al. v United States.  Word clouds, though certainly not the most scientific of visualization techniques, are often engaging and “fun” ways to lead…Read more › [Read more...]

  Based on Launchpad traffic and mailing list responses, Gabor and Tamas will soon be releasing igraph 0.6.  In celebration, I’ll be publishing a number of helpful lists and tables I’ve put together to organize information about igraph.   In…Read more › [Read more...]

  While Tsipras and his Syriza coalition have been busy in Greek parliament, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation that their platform will result in a Greek exit from the Euro currency.  This prospect, affectionately dubbed “Grexit” by Citi… Read more › [Read more...]

  The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent.  In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev,… Read more › [Read more...]

Let’s say you’ve used my Python script to automate the download of a hashtag or search phrase from Twitter (in a Unicode safe way, unlike within R).  Now let’s say you want to visualize the number of tweets over time.  Easy… Read more › [Read more...]

  Here’s a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity.  Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  Where would you go to find out what the longest bill of the 112th Congress was by number of sections (H. R. 1473)?  How about by number of unique words (H.R. 3671)?  What about by Flesh-Kincaid reading level  (S. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  Last year, I covered a number of the so-called “Twitter protests” in China (#cn220), Iran (#25bahman), and Algeria (#fev12).  Since these protests began in January 2011, the Arab Spring has claimed many members of both ruling and revolting groups … Continue reading → [Read more...]