Publications by John Myles White
American Immigration Trends
The New York Times has a beautiful visualization of immigration trends in the United States since 1880. I highly recommend spending a few minutes playing with the interactive display. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: "R-bloggers" via Tal Galili in Google Reader. R-bloggers.com offers...
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Marriage and Happiness
The Pew Research Center just published a piece reviewing their finding that people who are married report significantly greater levels of happiness than those who are unmarried. I always enjoy this result, particularly because of contemporary Western culture’s uneasy relationship with the institution of marriage. What I would really like to see...
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The Second Coming
Pew Research has found that 79% of Americans believe in The Second Coming of Jesus. What worries me more is not that 4 out of 5 Americans believe in The Second Coming, but that 1 out of 5 believes it will happen in their lifetime. It seems inevitable that such a belief will grossly warp your priorities: you would have no reason at all to care abo...
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Canabalt
At the office today, I got into a discussion with two of my fellow graduate students about the distribution of scores you can get while playing Canabalt. Because (1) the layout of the levels in the game is fully randomized and (2) the difficulty of certain actions (specifically jumping through windows) is exceptionally high, we were intrigued by ...
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The Top Scores for Canabalt, Take 2
Introduction As promised on Thursday, here’s my second pass at a statistical analysis of Canabalt scores. There are some useful results I’ll present right at the start, and then there are some results that are more or less worthless, except that working through my own mistakes helped me to think more clearly about statistical modeling in gene...
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R Function Usage Frequencies
A few months ago I decided to apply word frequency analysis ideas to R code. My idea was simple: the functions that one should invest the most effort into learning are precisely those functions that are used most frequently in real world code. In fact, this simple idea can be applied to spoken languages as valuably as to programming languages: th...
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Implementing Push and Pop in R
Having grown up with Perl, there are two functions that I desperately miss while programming in R: push and pop. Continually writing 1 vector <- c(vector, new.entry) tries my patience, while writing 1 2 vector <- rep(NA, inscrutable.constant) vector[inscrutable.index] <- new.entry makes me feel like I’m programming in C, rather than a higher-le...
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R Function Usage Frequencies, Take 2
Yesterday, Hadley Wickham commented on my post on the frequency of calling various R functions that it would be helpful to have the number of packages that call a function in addition to the number of times that the function is called. I compiled the relevant data last night: you can grab it here This data set includes a row for every function I ...
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Abstract Data Type Operations in R
This morning, I got a chance to read enough of the R Language Definition to finish my implementations of push and pop. While I was at it, I also wrote implementations of unshift, shift, queue and dequeue. Here they are: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46...
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R Function Usage Frequencies, Addendum
Since people have asked, here is a GitHub page with all of the code used to generate my R function usage analyses: cran-function-usage-analysis. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher » Statistics. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news ...
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