So why should R only be used for ’serious’ stuff? No longer! I’ve written the following code in R which executes a little gravitational physics game. The goal of the game is simple. You supply a velocity and direction to a spaceship with the goal of getting the ship ... [Read more...]

I’ve found this standard normal random number generator in a number of places, one of which being from one of Paul Wilmott’s books. The idea is that we can use the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to easily generate values distributed according to a standard normal distribution by using ... [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...]

Inspired by CXO group report, I did a rerun of the same strategy on my data. Easter’s dates can be find at wikipedia. Overall, my results are similar to CXO group’s results. In the graph below, I plotted daily returns on Easter week (Monday to Thursday) from 1982 to 2009. ... [Read more...]

All the tools I am using at the moment are free of charge. The one that comes to mind first is R. It’s a language for statistical computing which comes with a decent GUI. R comes with some time series support out of the box, but there are plenty ... [Read more...]

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This tutorial covers profiling of Linux servers using open-source tools such as "iostat", "oprofile" and "blktrace". Both processor-bound and I/O-bound cases are covered, and the emphasis is on tools that provide visual displays of relevant metrics. Li... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Thanks to Drew Conway (@drewconway), a PhD student at New York University, there are now eight excell... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Disclosure As you probably know, I live in the Portland, Oregon area and have for many years. One of ... [Read more...]

I spent this weekend reading Learning Python (Second Edition for Python 2.3!) by Mark Lutz. Python is my favorite programming language, but my experience with it has been mostly anecdotal; I come up with my own solutions and functions and I Google whatever I do not know. I decided to spend ... [Read more...]

In 2007, I was introduced to Twitter via the written qualifying exam towards my Ph.D.. At first, I did not know what to do with it. After a good year or so (maybe even sooner) passed, I began to follow some very interesting people that share the same interests as ... [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 Code Like A Pirate - The #rstats Appliance from the SUSE Gallery  The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources ... [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...]

Welcome to my new blog, Byte Mining! Data is all around us, all the time. It flows in from places you would least expect it, and more times that not, it remains in its original form untouched by human and machine. When data simply flows in and out of our ... [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...]

Aggregate electoral targeting is the process of determining the likely hood of a citizen choosing to vote turnout), and which candidate that person is most likely to vote for (partisan bias) in a given race using historical turnout and partisan bias. The output from this targeting allows a campaign to ... [Read more...]

Gerhard Niehaus Algorithmic Composition: Paradigms of Automated Music Generation by Gerhard Nierhaus Iannis Xenakis Formalized Music by Iannis Xenakis Music and Architecture: Architectural Projects, Texts, and Realizations by Iannis Xenakis Harry Partc... [Read more...]

If you ever work in Emacs with different files that all have the same name, this tip may be very useful for you. In my experience, this most often happens when working with Makefiles from multiple projects or directories. Assuming you have a buffer visiting a file called Makefile, by ... [Read more...]