Publications by Ethan Brown
Sensual marimba sunspots
Here’s the numbers of yearly sunspots, 1700-1988, brought to you by the nimble marimba of R: See ?sunspot.year in R for more information about the data. I did this last spring and just discovered it again. I’ve been so caught up in the current sound world of playitbyr (see this post for an example) that I forgot how good standard MIDI instru...
1126 sym
playitbyr 0.2-1: data through sound, now with layers, facets, and more pleasure
The latest playitbyr now offers more options and combinations for data sonification (exploring data through sound), with a ggplot2-inspired syntax. See the website for examples and how to get started. The recent Sonification Handbook has a chapter devoted to exploratory data analysis with sonification. With some help from Sam Ferguson, one of the...
3348 sym R (372 sym/3 pcs) 3 tbl
The whinny of the exponential horse
A Poisson process provides a good model for events that happen rarely. That’s what von Bortkiewicz realized in 1898 when he modeled deaths by horse kick in Prussian cavalry; since it would be ungentlemanly to actually kill my readers, I instead represent the events in a Poisson process using a horse’s whinny. Poisson processes have a very uni...
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Improved net stacked distribution graphs via ggplot2 trickery
Net stacked distribution graphs are a nice way of comparing data on a Likert scale (i.e. when respondents are asked whether they “Strongly Disagree”, “Disagree”, etc. with a statement). It strips out the neutral responses and centers the responses around the center of the graph so you can quickly compare agreement and disagreement on d...
4008 sym R (3007 sym/8 pcs) 2 img 8 tbl
Demonstrate your R code with an interactive, embeddable Javascript widget
There’s lots of helpful advice and examples on using R around the web. But what if your visitors could execute and play with simple R examples right on the web page? This is surprisingly easy to do, thanks to a web service and an embeddable widget provided by the Sage project. There are some kinks and caveats, but I think this feature has nice...
3804 sym R (571 sym/3 pcs) 2 img 3 tbl
Interactive R Notebooks with Jupyter and SageMathCloud
The Jupyter Notebook interface allows users to seamlessly mix code, output, and markdown commentary all in the same document. Sound a bit like R Markdown? The difference is that in a Jupyter Notebook, you execute the code right in the browser and view everything in the same visual view. Jupyter, formerly known as the IPython Notebook, has a ric...
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