Publications by andrew
Blog in motion
In the next few days we’ll be changing the format of the blog and moving it to a new server. If you have difficulty posting comments, just wait and post them in a few days when all should be working well. (But if you can post a comment, go for it. All the old entries and comments should be reappearing in the reconstituted blog.) Related To...
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R on the cloud
Just as scientists should never really have to think much about statistics, I feel that, in an ideal world, statisticians would never have to worry about computing. In the real world, though, we have to spend a lot of time building our own tools.It would be great if we could routinely run R with speed and memory limitations being less of a conce...
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Looking for NppToR beta testers.
I’m very happy to announce that there are great changes coming to NppToR. There are a few changes under the hood but the biggest change is the announcement of a new feature I call quick keys. Quick keys lets you define your own commands for easy evaluation in R. For example, the help command has been moved to the quick keys. It is still c...
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Infovis vs. statgraphics: A clear example of their different goals
I recently came across a data visualization that perfectly demonstrates the difference between the “infovis” and “statgraphics” perspectives. Here’s the image (link from Tyler Cowen): That’s the infovis. The statgraphic version would simply be a dotplot, something like this: (I purposely used the default settings in R with only mino...
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NppToR 2.6.0 beta 2
http://sourceforge.net/projects/npptor/files/npptor%20installer/NppToR-2.6.0.beta2.exe/download I’ve released beta 2 of NppToR 2.6.0. Please take a look and report any problems. This improves the installer and the uninstaller as well as a few bugs that popped up from the transition to UNICODE. Related To leave a comment for the author, pl...
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Using a “pure infographic” to explore differences between information visualization and statistical graphics
Our discussion on data visualization continues. One one side are three statisticians–Antony Unwin, Kaiser Fung, and myself. We have been writing about the different goals served by information visualization and statistical graphics. On the other side are graphics experts (sorry for the imprecision, I don’t know exactly what these people do i...
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Data manipulations
In the last Utah R Users group meeting I gave a presentation on data manipulations on R, and today I found through the plyr mailing list two commands that I was previously unaware of that should definitely be made mention of. arrange I was very pleased to find arrange because it fills the nagging hole for sorting data frames. Calling arrange(d...
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Why it doesn’t make sense to chew people out for not reading the help page
Karl Broman writes: Barry Rowlingson gave an interesting talk at UseR 2011, “Why R-help must die!” He suggested the Q-and-A type sites Stack Overflow (on programming) and Cross Validated (on statistics), both part of Stack Exchange. I haven’t used R-help recently but I do occasionally send people there. Just to see what was going on there,...
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Web-friendly visualizations in R
Aleks points me to this new tool from Wojciech Gryc. Right now I save my graphs as pdfs or pngs and then upload them to put them on the web. I expect I’ll still be doing this for awhile—I like having full control of what my graphs look like—but Gryc’s default plots might be useful for lots of people making their analyses more accessible. ...
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Wickham R short course
Hadley writes: I [Hadley] am going to be teaching an R development master class in New York City on Dec 12-13. The basic idea of the class is to help you write better code, focused on the mantra of “do not repeat yourself”. In day one you will learn powerful new tools of abstraction, allowing you to solve a wider range of problems with fewer ...
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