Publications by David Smith
How ideological is Google?
Adam Bonica, a grad student in political science at NYU, recently published a ranking of the political slant of various professions, based on the amount and recipient (Republican or Democratic) of political donations by lawyers, lobbyists, physicians and many other occupations. This paper (PDF) gives the complete analysis, but the chart below (cr...
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Because it’s Thursday: Epidemiology of the Undead
Noted statistician Andrew Gelman has teamed up with occultist George Romero to address the most serious public-health threat of out time: Zombies. They’ve published a paper in the journal Biomastika, “How many zombies do you know?” to propose the use of indirect survey methods to measure outbreaks of the undead:Abstract: The zombie menace...
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A free book on Geostatistical Mapping with R
Tomislav Hengl of the University of Amsterdam has published new book, A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping. It’s jam-packed with 291 pages on mapping and analyzing spatial data using free software including R, SAGA, GRASS, ILWIS and Google Earth, and freely-available map data. The book itself is also available for free, as an Open Acces...
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Because it’s Friday: Chatroulette
Yesterday, Drew Conway posted an analysis of the survival time to events on Chatroulette. If you’re familiar with Chatroulette, you’ll know what kind of events you can expect to occur when using it. (If you’re not, here’s a hint: don’t try it now if you’re at work.) Sadly, it was all an April Fool’s Day joke. But Drew takes the oppo...
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New R User Group in Chicago
While there’s been an informal coterie of R users in the Chicago area for some time (notably the fine folks behind the successful R/Finance conferences) there hasn’t been a formal R User Group. Until now, that is. JD Long has taken the plunge and announced the new Chicago R User Group on meetup.com. If you’re in the Chicagoland area, why no...
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Video: Seamless R Extensions using Rcpp and RInside
Dirk Eddelbuettel presented joint work with Romain François on calling C++ from R at the LA R User Group meeting last week. Now, with thanks to Drew Conway of the NY R User Group, video of the presentation is now available. It’s also embedded below — click on it for a larger view. Dirk’s slides are also available for download in handout ...
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New R User Group in Dallas
Wow, it’s a big week for new R User Groups. Larry D’Agostino has started up a new R user group based in Dallas, Texas (USA). It’s just getting started, and Larry posted the following request on the r-help mailing list: I would like to know if there is anyone like me interested in an R User Group in Dallas, TX. David Smith at REvolutions w...
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REvolution R Community 3.2 now available
REvolution R Community, REvolution’s free distribution based on R from the R Project, has been updated to version 3.2 and is now available for download for Windows and MacOS. Some features of this release include:Upgraded R engine. This release is based on R 2.10.1, the latest release (as of this writing). This brings many new features to the R...
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Because it’s Friday: Pixels invade New York
Posted for no other reason than it warms my gamer-geek heart to see NYC taken over by 8-bit video game characters. The Tetris sequence is particularly cool.Update: The original video was deleted from YouTube, I’m guessing because of copyright issues with the music. This version has no music. (Thanks to reader MB in the comments for the heads-up...
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Arizona court rules statistical sampling is legal
A court in Arizona has ruled that statistical sampling is legal for determining damages awarded to individual claimants when there are thousands of similar cases to be assessed simultaneously. In a case where 30,000 claims were filed Maricopa County, AZ by hospitals for improper reimbursement, the trial judge appointed a former judge as a speci...
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