Publications by David Smith
Find the fairest place to meet on the Paris Métro
When I lived in Paris years ago, I worked near Gare du Nord, but my friend Jenny lived near République. If we wanted to meet up after work, we'd just meet halfway along the Orange Métro line, around Gare de l'Est. Easy. Since that's within walking distance we wouldn't actually take the Métro, but Métro stations are useful waypoints in Paris e...
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Explore March Madness face-offs with this NCAA data visualizer
If you're laying down a friendly bet on the March Madness games or just tweaking your fantasy roster, this NCAA Data Visualizer by Rodrigo Zamith will be a boon. Just choose two teams to compare head-to-head, choose an attribute to compare them on. You can look at more than a dozen invividual player attributes (e.g. points scored, assists, 3-poin...
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Revolution Newsletter: March 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full March edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Get Results Fast with our Quick Start Programs: Need help getting value fr...
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What does a data scientist do?
The presentation below by Carlos Somohano (founder of Data Science London) provides the best description of a Data Scientist that I've seen in some time: Highlights include: On Slide 14, a history of the Data Science On Slide 22, the essential skills of data scientists (and a platypus) On Slide 26, 10 things data scientists do On Slide 27, a da...
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Facebook profile photo changes reveal trends in support for same-sex marriage
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the US Supreme Court heard two landmark cases related to same-sex marriage rights in this country. Simultaneously, to show solidarity for the cause of civil rights for gay members of society, thousands of Facebook users changed their profile pictures to a red equality symbol at the suggestion of the Human Right...
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R version 3 released
The R language marks a major milestone today with the release of R 3.0.0 (codename: “Masked Marvel”). The increment in the version number reflects not a fundamental change in the R langauge itself, but a recognition that the R codebase has matured to a point where closing out the 2.x series makes sense. Nonetheless, this release does includ...
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Visualize large data sets with the bigvis package
Creating visualizations of large data sets is a tough problem: with a limited number of pixels available on the screen (or just with the limited visual acuity of the human eye), massive numbers of symbols on the page can easily result in an uninterpretable mess. On Friday we shared one way of tackling the problem using Revolution R Enterprise: he...
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Behind the NCAA Visualizer: Python, R and JavaScript
Rodrigo Zamith's NCAA Tournament Visualizer is a great example of an interactive data visualization. If you want to create something similar, Rodrigo has shared detailed behind-the-scenes information on how it was created. He used a mix of tools: Python was used to scrape team statistics fromt the NCAA website R was used to prepare the data for ...
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A few lists for data scientists and statisticians
Looking for more resources on the web or people to follow on Twitter? Here are some lists you may find useful: 100 Savvy Sites on Statistics, which includes 17 sites that focus on R Programming Kalido offers this list of 30 influential data scientists on Twitter Big Data Republic is taking votes for this list of 100 influential tweeters on Big D...
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In case you missed it: March 2013 Roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from March of particular interest to R users. Facebook used R to analyze profile photo changes to create a map of same-sex marriage support in the USA. Joe Rickert contrasts random sampling with fitting models directly to large data sets. A presentation by Carlos Somohano summarizes the history, s...
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