Base R's stringsAsFactors default setting is supposedly the most often complained about piece of code in the whole R infrastructure. A search through the source code of all CRAN packages in December 2015 (Link) resulted in 3,492 mentions of stringsAsFactors. Most of the time these explicit mentions where found within calls to ... [Read more...]

What do Wikipedia's readers care about? Is Britney Spears more popular than Brittany? Is Asia Carrera more popular than Asia? How many people looked at the article on Santa Claus in December? How many looked at the article on Ron Paul? What can you find? Source: http://stats.grok.se/ ... [Read more...]

Although it is reasonable that R scripts get opened in edit mode by default, it would be even nicer (once in a while) to run them with a simple double-click. Well, here we go ... Choosing a new file extension name (.Rexec) First, we have to think about a new file ... [Read more...]

Elections are the most important events of political life. Their results determine who gets to be in government for the next few years. But how long do elections and their results capture the public's attention? In this blog post we take a look at Wikipedia page access statistics to find ... [Read more...]