Wikimania 2011 came to a close yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with Wikimania it may be described as UseR for Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki all rolled into one. The conference brings together staff, volunteer editors, volunteer developers and users of MediaWiki projects. Of specific interest to R Bloggers readers may ... [Read more...]

Last year Wikipedia rolled out a pilot program to use Wikipedia article creation as an assignment in the classroom. Students wrote articles on a topic area and rather than turning them into a professor and forgetting about it they upload it to Wikipedia and expose it to readers around the ... [Read more...]

Kaggle has released a new data-mining challenge: use data from 10 years of Wikipedia edits in order to predict future edit rates. The dataset has been anonymized in order to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness. I have ... [Read more...]

Should the world of R Wikibooks require a precis on truncated distributions, marijuana prices, or an obtusely coded method to visualize orthogonal least squares (spoiler alert: dot products are easier!), I’m your man! I hereby release all of the content and code in the R stuff category under the ... [Read more...]

The information below will be periodically updated at the folowing permanent link: http://www.backsidesmack.com/r-resources/ Searching for information on R sucks. Not only is the language name a letter of the alphabet (an ignominy it shares with C and some less well known languages), there is Pearson’s ... [Read more...]

While responding to this thread on Reddit I made a rough guess as to the heat retention of my french press when completely full of coffee. When I went to bed I realized there was no good reason why I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I meant to blog about the R/Finance conference during a lull, but I didn’t find too many. Unlike many conferences I’ve been to the structure of R/Finance was simple: one room and one speaker at a time. Relying on each … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The above graph borders on chartjunk (and is nothing like Paul Butler’s amazing Facebook map). We can see some variation in color but mostly it is a set of lines between 152 country capitals with no means to determine which … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The intersection of mapping APIs, fast database operations and user engagement offers a lot of very cool crowdsourcing applications ranging from the benign and powerful (Google’s Person Finder) to the minor and questionable (A DUI checkpoints app). Most intriguing in … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When working with labor economics, we often run into issues with selection on variables of interest. Regressing earnings on years of education to estimate the human capital earnings function makes sense at first blush until we imagine that education is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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I promise this is my last post on the now week and a half old π pay! Building on the last post, I figured I could show how convergence actually works in the estimation algorithm. If you’ll recall, we plotted … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Since I just didn’t get enough this morning, I spent some more time fooling around with estimating pi. Since I was basically counting the number of random x,y pairs inside a quarter circle and computing a sample average for more … Continue reading → [Read more...]

It is officially no longer pi day, but I didn’t see this Drew Conway post about estimating pi until just a few minutes ago. Because Google Reader doesn’t show github embeds, I also got to try it without seeing Drew’s … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Two posts ago I mentioned the age-earnings profile but did not provide a regression of log earnings on wage. I also offered, without evidence, that fitting a simple linear regression would be inappropriate. How do I know that? How could … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I like Labor Economics. Partially because it has a nice mix of theory and practical empiricism, but mostly because it seems to be a sub-field with a number of agreed upon stylized facts that grow not out of micro theory … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Here’s a post generated from my own ignorance of statistics (as opposed to just being marred by it)! In Labor Economics we walked through something called the truncated normal distribution. Truncated distributions come up a lot in the sciences because … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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