Publications by David Smith
A free book on probability and statistics with R
G Jay Kerns has published a 400+ page introductory text on Probability and Statistics. All of the examples and illustrations are done using R (as Jay puts it, “The people at the party are Probability and Statistics; the handshake is R”) so if you want to brush up on your probability and learn R at the same time, this might be a good resource....
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An analysis of the Wikileaks data with R
At his Zero Intelligence Agents blog, Drew Conway has taken on the task of performing a quantitative analysis (using R, of course) of the controversial Afghanistan document dump from Wikileaks. He’s started with an analysis of the overall flow of information in the five Afghanistan regions, categorized by type of activity (enemy, neutral,...
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Because it’s Friday: Double Rainbow
It’s sunny up here in Seattle (I’m attending BioConductor 2010 — Revolution’s a sponsor) now that the morning fog has lifted. So in honor of sunny Friday afternoons, I bring you the Double Rainbow song:(If you’ve been in a wi-fi-less cave for the past couple of weeks, check out the original.) Related To leave a comment for the author,...
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Revolution at JSM
If you’re in Vancouver for the Joint Statistics Meetings, come by and meet the Revolution team. (Revolution is a Silver Sponsor of JSM.) We’re at Booth 527 of the Exhibition Hall (near the poster displays) showing the new and upcoming features of Revolution R, and we’ve got lots of R-related goodies to give away.If you’re new to R, want t...
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On the Palin effect
Do Vice-Presidential candidates have any effect on the outcome of Presidential elections in the US? Some past research suggested their impact was negligible, but the 2008 election seems to have changed all that, at least in the case Sarah Palin. As reported on the Everyday Politics blog, a new paper (co-authored by Revolution Analytics’ CEO Nor...
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Announcing Big Data for Revolution R
I’ve hinted this was coming a few times before, but with today’s press release the announcement is official: the next release of Revolution R Enterprise will include “Big Data” capabilities thanks to the new RevoScaleR package. We’re pretty excited at how it’s turned out: it’s kinda amazing to be able to use R’s formula syntax lik...
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R Creators Accept Statistical Computing Award
In a dedicated session at the JSM conference here in Vancouver, the creators of R, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, accepted their prize (announced in January, but awarded today) from the American Statistical Association for “innovation in computing, software, or graphics that has had a great impact on statistical practice or research”. It�...
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New R User Group in Portland, OR
There’s another new R user group on the US West Coast, this time in Portland, Oregon. The Portland R User Group will hold their first meeting at the Lucky Labrador Brew Pub on Tuesday, August 17. If you’re in the Portland/Vancouver area, come along for beeRs and conversation with other useRs in your area. Incidentally, there are so many new ...
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Where have all the Hacker News old-timers gone?
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. As slashdot slowly loses its relevance and digg heads for a more general audience to head off competition from Twitter, loyal readers of uber-technical news aggregator Hacker News wonder if it’s heading the same way. Seems like the long-standing users aren’t posting links to deep, interesting articles any...
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How to animate Google Earth with R
We’ve looked before at how you can annotate geographical maps using R, but what if you want to overlay data onto a globe of the Earth, using Google Earth? The RKML package for R (from the OmegaHat project) allows you to do just that, by providing a high-level interface from R to generate KML files, which in turn are used to drive animations in ...
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