Publications by David Smith
New blog from Rmetrics Foundation
The Rmetrics Foundation (the sharp minds behind the Rmetrics suite of packages for financial analysis in R) have just launched a new blog where you can keep up with the latest Rmetrics news. Amongst the recent news: a ne eBook about data management of Indian financial market data, and a new interface between Rmetrics and AMPL. You can also follo...
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Analyzing competitive nordic skiing with R
Here’s another great example of R being used to analyze sports data. Statistician and skier Joran Elias has started a project to analyze and visualize international cross country ski racing results, and he publishes his analysis at the blog Statistical Skier. All of the analyses are done using R (and for data, SQLite via the RSQLite package)....
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How to: Debug in R
Revolution Analytics is proud to sponsor the New York R User Group. The last meeting was on the theme of debugging in R, and some videos of the talks are now available at the Video Rchive. Jay Emerson have a talk on Basic debugging in R and Harlan Harris dived deeper on advanced debugging techniques. Also presenting were Peter Flom (on demysti...
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Pollution from the BP oil spill
There’s been a lot of talk about the slicks and plumes of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but how does the presence of that oil translate into measurable pollution in the air, water, and sediment? The EPA is now releasing pollutants and making the data available for analysis. Because the data are online, it’s a simple process to read...
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Because it’s Friday: Insect sex
Birds do it, bees do it. But the bees and their insect brethren definitely do it in a more interesting way. Don’t believe me? Check out Isabella Rosselini’s description of bee sex and the other videos in her educational “Green Porno” series. It’s fascinating stuff. For some light summer reading, I also recommend Olivia Judson’s “Dr...
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How to peg 7 cores with doSMP
Statistics PhD student Nathan VanHoudnos has an 8-core laptop, and by his own admission, takes “an almost unhealthy pleasure in pushing [his] computer to its limits”. It seems like he’s found an outlet for this passion with the new doSMP library included with Revolution R, that allows him to use all his processors for some gnarly simulatio...
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Tips for managing memory in R
R is an in-memory application, so every new object you create takes up RAM. (Yes, there are ways around that, but that’s a topic for another article.) If you’re working on a small machine (say, a 32-bit Windows system with 1Gb of RAM or less) you might need to be careful with the object you create. This StackOverflow question offers some usef...
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June 2010 edition of R Journal available
The latest edition of the R Journal is now available. This issue includes in-depth articles on the packages IsoGene, glmmBUGS, cshapes, tmvtnorm, neuralnet, glmperm and exactci/exact2x2, plus an example of reproducible research in R. There’s also a review of the book A Beginner’s Guide to R. The complete edition is available for download in P...
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UseR! 2010 registration extended until July 4
Registration for the worldwide R user conference, useR! 2010, closed on June 20. But it seems like a few folks weren’t aware of the early deadline, and missed out on registering. Never fear! Due to overwhelming demand, registration has re-opened until midnight on July 4. You’ll need to hurry — there are only 30 spots left — so get in quic...
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The case of the missing zeroes
Political polling is a big industry these days, especially here in the US, and both mainstream news outlets and many of the bigger political blogs commission their own polls to measure (for example) the popularity of a sitting or candidate politician or policy. In the last week though, a very public spat has erupted between the left-leaning polit...
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