Publications by David Smith
Because it’s Friday: a video tour of the International Space Station
This video tour of the International Space Station from NASA commander Sunny Williams (via Andrew Sullivan)is just amazing: I loved, loved watching this — it made me feel like I was six again, when I wanted to be an astronaut. I hope NASA does more videos like this to inspire more boys and girls to be scientists and aspire one day to float as ...
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A strained Data Science analogy
In the sponsored article Data Science: Buyer Beware at Forbes, SAP's Ray Rivera takes a dim view of Data Science. According to Rivera, Data Science is a “management fad” in the mold of Business Process Reengineering, and casts data scentists as self-ordained “gurus” whose mission is to stand between the “ignorant masses” that need ac...
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A beginner’s guide to sharing and collaboration with R
In today's social world, it's important to be able to collaborate with others online when working with data, and to be able to easily share your outputs online. Fortunately, the R language and the broad R community provides a number of facilities for collaboration and sharing, which are summarized in Noam Ross's guide to tools for collaboration ...
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Life expectancy and retirement age in USA
Data Scientist John Myles White used R to compare life expectancy and retirement age in the USA. While male (red) and female (green) life expectancies are rising, average retirement age is going down. What this means for the future of benefit programs like Social Security is the topic of an interesting series of comments on the post. Related To...
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Revolution Newsletter: January 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full January edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Top Innovator, Big Data Technologies. Revolution Analytics is the proud r...
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Votamatic predicted the election with R
While Nate Silver got a lot of the attention for correctly forecasting the US presidential election, other forecasters were just as succesful. Drew Linzer used the R language to build the statistical model behind votamatic.org, and was able to predict the outcome of the election months before most pundits. Drew's model initially relied mostly on ...
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Video: Using R with Hadoop
If you weren't one of the almost 2000 people who signed up for yesterday's webinar “Using R with Hadoop“, the replay and slides are now available. During the webinar, Jeffrey Breen (Principal at Think Big Academy) talked about extracting analytics from data in Hadoop and covered: How to use R and Hadoop Hadoop streaming Various R packages an...
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Chances of making an NFL field goal
If the scores are tied in this weekend's Super Bowl and the game rests on the outcome of a field goal attempt, the chart below will tell you the chances of the goal being made. All you need to know is the distance of the kick: What this says that if the kick is longer than 50 yards, there's pretty much no chance. The chart was created by Decisio...
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Strata’s Data Driven Business Day
The tagline for O'Reilly Strata conference series — Making Data Work — has meant that it's always been popular with practitioners, primarily data scientists working with Big Data in real-world environments. Recent Strata events have also attracted more business-oriented attendees, with events focused more on processes and outcomes than on the...
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R users: Be counted in Rexer’s 2013 Data Miner Survey
Since 2007, Rexer Analytics has been conducting periodic surveys to measure the analytic behaviors, views and preferences of data miners and analytic professionals. In the last survey, conducted in 2011, more than 1300 analysts shared information about the data analysis software packages they use. (The results of all Rexer surveys are available ...
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