A while back I wrote a blog post on the R package I wrote for reading and manipulating grads data. The library is quite basic, and does not support a number of grads data file options: Using one ctl file,… See more › [Read more...]

Because I do not have root privileges on some of the machines I use, I build part of my software from source and install it into my own homedirectory. Doing that requires one to download R from CRAN, e.g. R… See more › [Read more...]

Only recently I discovered StackOverflow. I know, as a nerd already programming for many years that is quite late. For those who are not familiar with StackOverflow (aka SO), it is a Question and Answer site for programmers. It is… See more › [Read more...]

I really love the plyr package. Apart from having a progress bar and plyr handeling a lot of the overhead, a very interesting feature is being able to run plyr in parallel mode. Essentially, setting .parallel = TRUE runs any… See more › [Read more...]

Which text editor do you use? Once in a while this question pops up on the R-help mailing list. Up until recently I used the KDE text editor Kate under Linux. Recently, I came across a new text editor for… See more › [Read more...]

I created an R package to read grads data. As far as I know, there is no dedicated package to read grads data. The package is still quite new, any remarks on the documentation or code are more than welcome.… See more › [Read more...]

Drawing maps of the polar regions can be done using square spatial maps. A small example says more than a thousand words: xlim = c(-180,180) ylim = c(60,90)   # Some fake grid data dat_grid = expand.grid(x = xlim[1]:xlim[2], y… See more › [Read more...]

Sometimes people ask very basic questions on the R-help mailing list, which could have easily been answered by reading some R manual or doing a quick Google search. Responses on the mailing range from people answering the question to “Please… See more › [Read more...]

This is a copy of a post by me on the R-statistics blog. Fortran and C programmers often say that interpreted languages like R are nice and all, but lack in terms of speed. How fast something works in R… See more › [Read more...]

Wikimania 2011 came to a close yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with Wikimania it may be described as UseR for Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki all rolled into one. The conference brings together staff, volunteer editors, volunteer developers and users of MediaWiki projects. Of specific interest to R Bloggers readers may ... [Read more...]

Last year Wikipedia rolled out a pilot program to use Wikipedia article creation as an assignment in the classroom. Students wrote articles on a topic area and rather than turning them into a professor and forgetting about it they upload it to Wikipedia and expose it to readers around the ... [Read more...]

Kaggle has released a new data-mining challenge: use data from 10 years of Wikipedia edits in order to predict future edit rates. The dataset has been anonymized in order to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness. I have ... [Read more...]

Should the world of R Wikibooks require a precis on truncated distributions, marijuana prices, or an obtusely coded method to visualize orthogonal least squares (spoiler alert: dot products are easier!), I’m your man! I hereby release all of the content and code in the R stuff category under the ... [Read more...]

The information below will be periodically updated at the folowing permanent link: http://www.backsidesmack.com/r-resources/ Searching for information on R sucks. Not only is the language name a letter of the alphabet (an ignominy it shares with C and some less well known languages), there is Pearson’s ... [Read more...]

While responding to this thread on Reddit I made a rough guess as to the heat retention of my french press when completely full of coffee. When I went to bed I realized there was no good reason why I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I meant to blog about the R/Finance conference during a lull, but I didn’t find too many. Unlike many conferences I’ve been to the structure of R/Finance was simple: one room and one speaker at a time. Relying on each … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The above graph borders on chartjunk (and is nothing like Paul Butler’s amazing Facebook map). We can see some variation in color but mostly it is a set of lines between 152 country capitals with no means to determine which … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The intersection of mapping APIs, fast database operations and user engagement offers a lot of very cool crowdsourcing applications ranging from the benign and powerful (Google’s Person Finder) to the minor and questionable (A DUI checkpoints app). Most intriguing in … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When working with labor economics, we often run into issues with selection on variables of interest. Regressing earnings on years of education to estimate the human capital earnings function makes sense at first blush until we imagine that education is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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