Publications by Ethan Brown
Newcomb, Benford, and their Dirty, Dirty Logarithms
Tom Taverner introduced me to Benford’s Law as we were eating lunch together at a statistical computing conference: If you look at the first digits of data in many naturally-occuring datasets, a startling 30 percent of them are ones. “Pah!” I said. “That belies intuition! Why would one digit occur any more than another? I’d expect each ...
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Dial-a-statistic! Featuring R and Estonia
Did you wake up this morning hoping that you would be able to listen to telephone beeps inspired by Estonian web site metrics? I knew you did! First things first: I came up with the slightly crazy idea of using the bleepy sounds that telephones make, called “dual-tone multifrequency” (DTMF) tones, as a tool in exploring Benford’s Law. I’...
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Listening for trends in US baby names over 130 years
What happens when you mash together R‘s data crunching magic, Festival‘s speech synthesis power, and the audio wonders of the venerable music language Csound? You fall even more in love with free and open-source software, and you start hearing sounds like this: A single beat of the above sound represents the top 1000 baby names for one year,...
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Rhythms of Equality and Inequality
Today I unveil my very first statistical YouTube video! I will do anything to keep you statisfied, and if that means YouTube, then so be it. But first, some exposition: In Panama, 10 percent of the population owned 45 percent of the income in 2000, whereas the bottom 10 percent owned only 0.6 percent. How typical is this? And how does inequality ...
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The Most Romantic Electro-Grunge Statistical Computing Song Ever Made
Warning message: This song contains highly suggestive coefficients and graphic depictions of exuberant R-core lovin’. “Plotting Ihaka” is based on Rotting Piñata by Sponge, and reflects a small measure of my boundless joy in the world of R. Despite being a firm proponent of muffins, I can confidently say that I would rather live in a worl...
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Howling Winds and Stochastic Tones
My greatest pleasures in mathematics come from observing–and here, listening to–the interplay of simple and complex. With a few axioms and definitions you can create surprising worlds, and in what seems like a mess you can find beautiful regularities. It’s damn sexy, frankly. Here, I use a simple recursive equation to directly generate my s...
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New R-generated Video: Has StackOverflow Posting Behavior Changed Over Time?
Sparks have been flying between my favorite data analysis language and my favorite programmer’s Q & A site since long ago: R flirted with StackOverflow on September 10, 2008, 5 days before StackOverflow was even open to the public. R still hesitates to leave its original suitor, the loud and lively R-help mailing list, where many of the heavywe...
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The Work of the 1 Percent and the 0.1 Percent
The Occupy Wall Street movement chants “We are the 99 percent, you are the 1 percent.” It’s a catchy refrain, and there are many excellent reasons to put the focus on Wall Street in the struggle for economic and political justice in the US. But even singling out one percent of the US means we are still talking about over 3 million people–...
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R’s Distrotheque
(Update: The csound package is now available on CRAN.) Do your random variables need to groove more? Of course they do. That’s why I’ve been working on the upcoming csound package for R, which connects to Csound computer synthesis software to make any sound imaginable. Your computer’ll be the hippest sample space on the randomized block. Yo...
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Diamonds vs. water smackdown in playitbyr-powered podcast
Apparent Reason, my new monthly podcast, is a boisterous and non-technical discussion of economics and statistics. In that format I don’t have the luxury of showing charts and graphs to complement my discussion, so I use the playitbyr package to represent the data as sound. (Apparently February is a great month to start R-related podcasts! We e...
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