I just returned from the useR! 2012 conference for developers and users of R. One of the common themes to many of the presentations was integration of R-based statistical systems with other systems, be they other programming languages, web systems, or enterprise data systems. Some highlights for me were an update ... [Read more...]

Learning to use a data analysis tool well takes significant effort, so people tend to continue using the tool they learned in college for much of their careers. As a result, the software used by professors and their students is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

As I’ve discussed here before, there is a debate raging (ok, maybe not raging) about terms such as “data science”, “analytics”, “data mining”, and “big data”. What do they mean, how do they overlap, and perhaps most importantly, who are the people who work in these fields? Along with ... [Read more...]

I think one of valid criticisms around a lot of the visualisations I post here and on my various #f1datajunkie blogs is that I often don’t post any explanatory context around the visualisations. This is partly a result of the way I use my blog posts in a ... [Read more...]

Programmers should definitely know how to use R. I don’t mean they should switch from their current language to R, but they should think of R as a handy tool during development.Again and again I find myself working with Java code like the following. td.linenos { background-color: #f0... [Read more...]

This past Friday, the web portal to the US Federal government, USA.gov, organized hackathons across the US for programmers and data scientists to work with and analyze the data from their link-shortening service. It turns out that if you shorten a web link with bit.ly, the shortened link ... [Read more...]

In my previous post, I motivated a web application that would allow small-scale sustainable meat producers to sell directly to consumers using a meat share approach, using constrained optimization techniques to maximize utility for everyone involved. In this post, I’ll walk through some R code that I wrote to ... [Read more...]

For a project I’m working on at work, I’m building a predictive model that categorizes something (I can’t tell you what) into two bins. There is a default bin that 95% of the things belong to and a bin that the business cares a lot about, containing 5% of ... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit My Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit is about to move into private beta. What's in the release?... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit How The Chart Was Made Whenever a Twitter user posts a tweet, an object is created and entered into t... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Media Inactivist, Thought Follower, Sit-Down Comic, Social Media Analytics Researcher, Former Boy Gen... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Download Code Like A Pirate - The #rstats Appliance from the SUSE Gallery Disclosure As you probably ... [Read more...]

Every year, I single out what I think are the Top Five open source projects. This year, there's only one hold-over from previous years, and it's likely that I'm just going to give it a Lifetime Achievement Award and pick five others next year. 5. NetBe... [Read more...]

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topsyWidgetPreload({ "url": "http%3A%2F%2Fborasky-research.net%2F2009%2F10%2F20%2Fthe-geese-are-migrating-and-so-have-i%2F", "style": "big", "title": "The geese are migrating, and so have I" }); As someone wiser than I once said, “It’s fall – time to roast footballs and play touch marshmallow.” Or something like that. It’s the time of ... [Read more...]

R-2.9.2 was released in August. While R can be considered stable and battle-ready, it is also far from stagnation. It is humbling to see such an intelligent and vibrant community helping CRAN grow faster than ever. Every day I see a new package or read a new comment on R-Help [...] [Read more...]

This is a post about systems, applications, services and architectures for building and deploying analytics. Sometimes this is called analytic infrastructure. In this post, we look at several trends impacting analytic infrastructure. Trend 1. Open source analytics has reached Main Street. R, which was first released in 1996, is now [...] [Read more...]