Publications by Markus Gesmann
Survey: Writing package vignette
I am currently co-writing the vignette for the ChainLadder package and wonder what I should be focusing on. I have co-written the vignette of the googleVis package in the past and based it purely and what I thought would work. So, this is an experiment to find out, if user feedback will help me to write a better vignette. Let’s see ...
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Feedback from vignette survey
Many thanks to all who participated in the survey about writing R package vignettes.Following my post last Thursday the responses came in quickly in the evening and all day on Friday. Since Saturday the response rate has been decreasing constantly and I think it is time for a summary based on the 56 responses received. Summary – Things to keep ...
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Managing change
Why the old and new the need to share time togetherIt takes time to appreciate the new. Even if the new is much better than the old. But, it is easy to forget when you yourself created the exciting new.At the end of August 2011 Google announced a new Blogger interface. The new interface offered about the same functionality, but had a different lo...
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Credit rating by country
The financial crisis has put a lot of pressure on countries’ long-term foreign currency credit ratings, with France recently being downgraded by S&P. Wikipedia provides a list of countries by credit ratings as report by US rating agencies S&P, Fitch, Moody’s and Dagong, a Chinese rating agency. So, was does the world look like t...
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Say it in R with "by", "apply" and friends
Iris versicolor (Source: Wikipedia)R is a language, as Luis Apiolaza pointed out in his recent post. This is absolutely true, and learning a programming language is not much different from learning a foreign language. It takes time and a lot of practice to be proficient in it. I started using R when I moved to the UK and I wonder, if I have a be...
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R is the easiest language to speak badly
I am amazed by the number of comments I received on my recent blog entry about “by”, “apply” and friends. I had started my post by pointing out that R is a language. Well indeed, I have come to the conclusion, that it is a language with lots of irregular expressions and dialects. It feels a bit like German or French where you have to lear...
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googleVis 0.2.14 is released
Version 0.2.14 of the googleVis package was released on CRAN today.ChangesThe help files have been checked against changes of the Google Visualisation API, typos in the vignette have been ironed out (thanks to Pat Burns for pointing them out), a new section on dealing with apostrophes in column names has been added and the example in the section ...
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The reshape function
The other day I wrote about the R functions by, apply and friends, which allow me to operate on subsets of data. All those functions work nicely, if the data is given in the right format. More often than not it isn’t and I have to reshape the data beforehand. Thus, time to discuss the reshape function. I will focus on the reshape function in ba...
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Reshaping the IT world
During my university time I worked on the IT help desk for a while. One day I received a call from a professor, who said that his printer had stopped working. So I asked him, if there was a message on the display and if he could read it to me. “Oh yes”, he said, “it says: ‘Load A4 paper.'” Rachel King quotes a study by Cisco on ZDnet, ...
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Big data seminar in London on 1 March 2012
Removable disk packs in 1975Source: Wikipedia, via Deutsche Fotothek David Chan from City University is organising an interdisciplinary symposium on tackling the ‘Big Data’ challenge on 1 March 2012.It is an open seminar trying to bring together academics and practitioners from across industry to tackle the challenges posed by “big data�...
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