With the release of the eBook version of Machine Learning for Hackers this week, many people have been asking for the code. With good reason—as it turns out—because O’Reilly still (at the time of this writing) has not updated the book page to include a link to ... [Read more...]

Because it’s Friday—and I needed to create this for a separate visualization—here is how to create an animated clock in R using ggplot2. In just about 20 lines of code! And here is the clock… I think this is a nifty way to show time elapse, rather than ... [Read more...]

For our forthcoming book on machine learning for hackers, John Myles White and I will discuss clustering, and various methods for doing so. One common method for clustering observations [...] [Read more...]

Yesterday Brett Goldstein, the Chief Data Officer for the City of Chicago, announced on Twitter the release of Chicago’s crime data for the past year. The data is very detailed, and wonderful resource for criminologist and social scientists alike. I have been playing around with the data a bit, ... [Read more...]

Yesterday Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden shocked the world by revealing that iPhones and iPads have been keeping track of our every move, and saving the data in obfuscated back up files. As my friend Vince Buffalo mentioned on Twitter, part of me was disgusted by the secret stalking Steve ... [Read more...]

Like many people who crunch numbers frequently, I have increasingly been integrating Amazon’s cloud computing services into my daily workflow. In particular, I have been using their elastic cloud computing (EC2) on a regular basis. The service is an excellent way to offload computationally intensive work from your laptop ... [Read more...]

Recently, the good folks at Infochimps.com rolled out a series of new APIs to add to their already impressive set of data resources. I have been in a perpetual state of catch-up since the new year, so I have only now got around to adding some of these new ... [Read more...]

As you may know, today is Pi Day, when all good nerds take a moment to thank the geeks of antiquity for their painstaking work in estimating this marvelous mathematical constant. It is also a great opportunity to thank contemporary geeks for the wonders of modern computing, which allow us ... [Read more...]

Last month, Amanda Cox from The New York Times Graphic Department gave a great talk to the NYC R Statistical Programming Meetup. I’ve just got around to uploading the video, which has been broken into a part one and part two. You can also view the videos embedded after ... [Read more...]

Those in the political science discipline probably remember their first encounter with poliscijobrumors.com. For those outside, you have probably never heard of this particular message board, and you would have no reason to. As the URL suggests, the board specializes in rumor, gossip, back-bitting, mudslinging, and the occasional lucid ... [Read more...]

Those in the political science discipline probably remember their first encounter with poliscijobrumors.com. For those outside, you have probably never heard of this particular message board, and you would have no reason to. As the URL suggests, the board specializes in rumor, gossip, back-bitting, mudslinging, and the occasional lucid ... [Read more...]

My friend Michael Bommarito has been doing the data community quite a service, capturing and sharing all of the traffic on Twitter related to the Iranian protests. Specifically, he has all of the tweets containing the #25bahman hast-tag, and made them available for anyone to download. I am unable to ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

Tomorrow I am headed out of town for a few weeks, so posting will be lighter than the usual lightness. My first stop is Chicago, and tomorrow night I will be speaking about my R package for the infochimps API at the Chicago R Users Group. If you are in ... [Read more...]

Jeromy Anglim, fellow social scientist and R aficionado from across the globe, gave a great talk to the Melbourne R Users Group last week on the joys of creating reproducible results. A subject near and dear to me, but not one that is given enough attention in research training. Jeromy ... [Read more...]

In a few weeks I will be visiting Chicago, and JD Long—the organizer of the local R users group—has graciously invited me to give a presentation. Ostensibly, the presentation will be on my recently released infochimps package, so I thought it was a good time to start actually ... [Read more...]

I have finally taken the plunge and created my first R package! As frequent readers will know, I often sing the praises of infochimps, a startup out of Austin, TX attempting to be the world’s data clearinghouse. While infochimps is an excellent resource for data sets, they also provide ... [Read more...]

As part of my on-going research simulating network structure using graph motifs I have been collecting novel data sets to test and benchmark the method. Since I am a political scientist studying conflict, it was suggested to me to collect a co-authorship network within this sub-discipline. Such a network is ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]