Publications by Matt Asher
Waiting in line, waiting on R
I should state right away that I know almost nothing about queuing theory. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do some queuing simulations. Another reason: when I’m waiting in line at the bank, I tend to do mental calculations for how long it should take me to get served. I look at the number of tellers attending, pick an average teller ses...
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Queueing up in R, continued
Shown above is a queueing simulation. Each diamond represents a person. The vertical line up is the queue; at the bottom are 5 slots where the people are attended. The size of each diamond is proportional to the log of the time it will take them to be attended. Color is used to tell one person from another and doesn’t have any other meaning. Co...
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Wasting away again in Martingaleville
Alright, I better start with an apology for the title of this post. I know, it’s really bad. But let’s get on to the good stuff, or, perhaps more accurately, the really frightening stuff. The plot shown at the top of this post is a simulation of the martingale betting strategy. You’ll find code for it here. What is the martingale betting st...
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My oh my
Noted without comment, visit Biostatistics Ryan Gosling !!! for more gems like the one above. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Probability and statistics blog » r. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click her...
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Iowa: Was the fix in? (a statistical analysis of the results)
Summary/TL;DR Either the first precincts to report were widely unrepresentative of Iowa as a whole, or something screwy happened. Background Yesterday was the first primary for the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. When I logged off the internet last night, the results in Iowa showed a dead heat between Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. W...
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The unicorn problem
Let’s say your goal is to observe all known species in a particular biological category. Once a week you go out and collect specimens to identify, or maybe you just bring your binoculars to do some spotting. How long will it take you to cross off every species on your list? I’ve been wondering this lately since I’ve begun to hang out on th...
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How fat are your tails?
Lately I’ve been thinking about how to measure the fatness of the tails of a distribution. After some searching, I came across the Pareto Tail Index method. This seems to be used mostly in economics. It works by finding the decay rate of the tail. It’s complicated, both in formula and in it’s R implementation (I couldn’t get “awstindex�...
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The surprisingly weak case for global warming
I welcome your thoughts on this post, but please read through to the end before commenting. Also, you’ll find the related code (in R) at the end. For those new to this blog, you may be taken aback (though hopefully not bored or shocked!) by how I expose my full process and reasoning. This is intentional and, I strongly believe, much more hones...
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Let it snow!
A couple days ago I noticed a fun piece of R code by Allan Roberts, which lets you create a digital snowflake by cutting out virtual triangles. Go give it a try. Roberts inspired me to create a whole night sky of snowflakes. I tried to make the snowfall look as organic as possible. There are lots of options to adjust. Here’s the code, have fun ...
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Simulation of landmine clearing with Massoud Hassani’s Mine Kafon
Code used: MineClearingSimulationWithKafons.r TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO: Hello, I’m Matt Asher with StatisticsBlog.com. This video is about my attempt to simulate a landmine clearing device built by Massoud Hassani called the Mine Kafon. I’ve put a link to his webpage at StatisticsBlog.com, I highly recommend checking out the video. Hassani’s dev...
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