Publications by David Smith
Survey question biases and crowdsourcing
It’s common knowledge that the way you ask a question in a survey can bias the results you get. (It’s been a staple of political pollsters since the dawn of time.) But Aaron Shaw from Dolores Labs has used an interesting technique to demonstrate that bias: crowdsourcing. He asked the same question of crowdsourced respondents assigned randomly...
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R’s exponential package growth, ctd.
Reader SK has collected the most recent data on R’s package growth, through the latest 2.10 release. The three most recent releases fall slightly below the exponential growth line, which isn’t altogether surprising (that’s a lot of growth to sustain!). Another interesting thing to look at would be the combined rate of new packages submitted...
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Because it’s Friday: Gravity Wells
It’s a little strange to see a web comic come up with such interesting visualizations, but xkcd has followed up on their movie timelines charts with this illustration of the gravitational attraction of the various bodies in the solar system. The gravitational force at the surface of the planet or moon determines how high you’d need to jump in...
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Bay Area User Group: R-Powered Web Apps
For those in the San Francisco area, tomorrow night’s Bay Area R User Group meeting — to be held at Twitter’s HQ — is a must-see. The theme is “R-Powered Web Apps” and features guest speakers Jeroen Ooms and Jeff Horner. (Disclosure: REvolution Computing is sponsoring Jeroen’s appearance at this event.) We’ve featured Jeroen’s a...
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Quick thoughts on “R-Powered Web Apps”
Good session at last nights Bay Area UseR Group meeting on R-Powered Web Apps. First of all, there’s clearly a lot of interest in using R in Web-based applications: although the program was only announced a week ago, more than 100 people showed up for the talks from Jeff Horner and Jeroen Oons. Second, the Twitter offices are very cool (fact: t...
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Equivalents to SAS, SPSS modules in R
Bob Muenchen, the author of R for SAS and SPSS Users, has created a handy table listing the R packages that implement the statistical methods included in add-on modules for SAS and SPSS. For example, if you’re looking for the equivalent structural equation modeling functions you might be using in PROC CALIS from SAS/STAT or the SPSS “Amos” ...
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A tale of two visualizations (because it’s Friday)
GEEK FIGHT!!! says JD Long on Twitter as the New York Times publishes a widely-reposted interactive graphic about Netflix rental data, and the Wall Street Journal also gets into the interactive-viz game with a graphic on bank bonuses. If it’s a fight, it’s a knockout in the first round, if you ask me. There’s no surprise why the Netflix ch...
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New features in ggplot2 version 0.85
Hadley Wickham recently updated the ggplot2 package for R to version 0.8.5. In addition to bugfixes and performance improvements, this version introduces some handy new features. Among them: the ability to display mathematical equations as text, automatic legends for color scales, and user-configurable axis labels and legend titles. The Learni...
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New UseR group in Seattle, WA
There’s a new local R user group to add to the list. The latest addition is in Seattle, WA and the first meeting of the Seattle useR Group is tomorrow. The group is organized by Zack Stednick (a data analyst and R user at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle), and this meeting is hosted by my colleague and R technical support ...
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How to integrate R into web-based applications (video)
The slides and videos from Jeff Horner’s talk at last week’s Bay Area User Group session on R-Powered Web Apps are now available. I’ve embedded it here below, but you might want to click through to larger size for better readability on the slides.Jeff’s talk (titled “Use Rapache! It works”) gives an overview of how to integrate R into...
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