Publications by David Smith
Because it’s Friday: Foxes on a Trampoline
They’re foxes. They’re on a trampoline. And they’re jumping. I don’t think there’s much more for me to add: Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here...
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R has the best models
We had a great time at the JSM conference, and I really enjoyed meeting with all the useRs at the Revolution mixer on Wednesday evening (where this photo was taken). Hope everyone had a great time — thanks for coming! Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions. R-bloggers.com...
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R unfolds the history of the Afghanistan war
Drew Conway continues his analysis of the Wikileaks data. Having concluded that the data appear legitimate (except perhaps in one region, based on a Benford’s Law analysis of the numbers in the documents), Drew follows up with a spatio-temporal analysis of activity within Afghanistan, based on the datelines of the documents themselves (click to...
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A Twitter feed for R links
India-based data scientist Harsh Singhal has compiled “State of the R”: a list of more than 50 links to R-related websites, which has generated much discussion on the R Project group on LinkedIn. Now, even if you’re not on LinkedIn, you can find the list at the new Links4R Twitter profile, and get updates about new links by following @Links...
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Baseball games: getting longer?
ESPN’s Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) recently suggested that the primary cause of dwindling interest in Red Sox games by fans is that baseball games these days are too long. “It’s not that fun to spend 30-45 minutes driving to a game, paying for parking, parking, waiting in line to get in, finding your seat … and then, spend the next ...
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R’s role in the national response to the BP Oil Spill
In the early days of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the rate of flow of oil from the spill was of great concern: estimating it accurately was key to coordinating the scale and scope of the response to the emergency. Unfortunately, estimates from independent sources varied widely, and BP’s own estimates varied widely over...
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Presentations and video from useR! 2010 available
For anyone who missed the useR! 2010 conference in Gaithersburg last month (or just wants to revisit some of the amazing talks), you can now find slides from many of the contributed presentations available for download. (Look for the [S] link to download slides.) The presentations from the Revolution team members are there, including: My presenta...
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New R User Group in Singapore
There’s yet another R user group starting, this time in Singapore. Their first meetup is next week, on Wednesday August 25. If you’re in Singapore, come along and meet your fellow R users!meetup.com: R User Group – SG Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions. R-bloggers.co...
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Distributions in R
One of the R language’s most powerful features is its ability to deal with random distributions: not just generating random numbers from various distributions (based on a very powerful pseudo-random number generator), but also calculating densities, probabilities, and quintiles. John Cook provides a handy reference chart listing all of the dist...
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New R User Group in Raleigh-Durham
New local R user groups keep on popping up on a regular basis, which is great to see. The latest one is deep in SAS territory: it’s the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill R Users Group in They don’t have any meetings scheduled just yet (but when they do their gracious meetup hosts are Carrboro Creative Coworking). So if you’re in the area why ...
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