Publications by JD Long
Using the R multicore package in Linux with wild and passionate abandon
One of my primary uses for R is to build stochastic simulations of insurance portfolios and reinsurance treaties. It’s not uncommon for each of my simulations to take 20 seconds or more to complete (if you’re doing the math, that’s 55 hours for 10K sims or, approximately 453 games of solitaire) . Initially I ran my sims in R running on an O...
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You can Hadoop it! It’s elastic! Boogie woogie woog-ie!
This blog's name in Chinese! I just came back from the future and let me be the first to tell you this: Learn some Chinese. And more than just cào nǐ niáng (肏你娘) which your friend in grad school told you means “Live happy with many blessings”. Trust me, I’ve been hanging with Madam Wu and she told me it doesn’t mean that. So ho...
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Real-World, Real-Time Analytics
Stop wasting time reading my drivel. You need to head over the the DataWrangling.com blog and read Peter Skomoroch’s interview with Bradford Cross of FlightCaster. Peter wrote up this interview back in August 2009, so I’m a little late to this party. There’s some really great quotes in this interview. Here’s a few of my fav quotes from Cr...
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Lookup Performance in R
Rumor has it that Joe Adler, author of the O’Reilly Book R in a Nutshell, has joined Linked In as a data scientist. But that does not keep him from still pumping out some interesting content over at OReilly.com. His latest article is about lookup performance in R. He does a great job giving code samples and explaining what he is doing. Worth ...
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The Future of Math is Statistics
The future of math is statistics… and the language of that future is R: I’ve often thought there was way too little “statistical intuition” in the workplace. I think Author Benjamin would agree. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Cerebral Mastication » R. R-bloggers.com offe...
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Chicago R User Group… It’s for the sexy people!
Morris Day, y'all! I think we all know that Morris Day was talking about when he wrote the lyrics to “The Bird”: Yes! Hold on now, this dance ain’t for everybody. Just the sexy people. White folks, you’re much too tight. You gotta shake your head like the black folks. You might get some tonight. Look out! That’s right, he was talking a...
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Simulating Dart Throws in R
Back in November 2009 Wired wrote an article about some grad students who decided to try to stochastically model throwing darts. Because I don’t actually read printed material I didn’t see the article until a couple of months ago. My immediate thought was, “hey, I drink beer. I throw darts. I build stochastic models. Why haven’t I done th...
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Virtual Conference: R the Language
On Tuesday May 4th at 9:30 PM central, 10:30 eastern, I’ll be giving a live online presentation as part of the Vconf.org open conference series. I’ll be speaking about R and why I started using R a couple years ago. This is NOT going to be a technical presentation but rather an illustration of how an R convert was created and why R became par...
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Chicago R Meetup: Healthier than Drinking Alone
I’m kinda blown away by the number of folks who have joined the Chicago R User Group (RUG) in the last few weeks. As of this morning we have 65 people signed up for the group and 25 who have said that they are planning on attending the meetup this Thursday (yes, only 3 days away!) I’m very pleased that this many people in Chicago find the R l...
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Bootstrapping the latest R into Amazon Elastic Map Reduce
I’ve been continuing to muck around with using R inside of Amazon Elastic Map reduce jobs. I’ve been working on abstracting the lapply() logic so that R will farm the pieces out to Amazon EMR. This is coming along really well, thanks in no small part to the Stack Overflow [r] community. I have no idea how crappy coders like me got anything at...
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