Yesterday, a commenter reminded me of the very popular hobby among scientists of searching for power-law distributions in large event data. While the commonality of scale invariance in event data is quite well known—particularly with respect to conflict data—this has not prevented many researchers from seeking and finding ... [Read more...]

WARNING: This has nothing to do with national security, but is nonetheless awesome. This evening I will be participating in that great annual tradition which marks the transition from Summer to Fall: the fantasy football draft. A large part of having a successful fantasy football draft is being able to ... [Read more...]

Visualisation of Activity in Afghanistan using the Wikileaks data from Mike Dewar on Vimeo. The latest visualization of the WikiLeaks data compiled by our group is an animation of the intensity of report observations in Afghanistan over the six year period in the WikiLeaks data. Team member Mike Dewar did ... [Read more...]

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As I mentioned last week, I will be hosting videos of several of the keynote speakers from this year’s useR! 2010 conference at the video Rchive. As it happens, the first video I was able to upload was the panel discussion we held on starting local R user groups. I ... [Read more...]

Today, I am packing up the car and heading south to my old home, Washington, DC, for the useR! 2010 conference, which is being held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Incidentally, where I was an intern in the Information Technology Lab during college. If you are not able ... [Read more...]

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Thanks to the R Bloggers aggregator I came across Yihui Xie’s post on a piece currently making the rounds about statistical analysis platforms. In The Next Big Thing, AnnMaria De Mars makes the argument that R—as a statistical computing platform—is not well suited for what she views ... [Read more...]

I have just uploaded a bunch of new videos the Rchive (yea, that’s what I am calling it now). Most of the videos are from the April NYC meetup, which include the following talks: Pankaj Chopra—using R and Bioconductor (http://www.bioconductor.org/) for biomarker detection in cancer ... [Read more...]

I just added a new video to the R repository, and this one comes from the Los Angeles R Meetup. The folks in LA were fortunate enough to have Dirk Eddelbuettel—renowned R expert and StackOverflow super-user—discuss his joint work with Romain François for interfacing C++ and R ... [Read more...]

Did you really think that a team of researchers spent their weekends counting the number of shirtless adolescent men and exposed penises they could find on charoulette.com? Perhaps you should not answer that, as it may be a better measure of your opinion of sociologist than gullibility. It is ... [Read more...]

For those of you used to reading about international relations, I apologize for the following brief foray into American politics. It appears that the American Enterprise Institute and David Frum have decided to (abruptly) part ways. Before David left, however, he and his team of interns provided some interesting statistical ... [Read more...]

Today is the one year anniversary of the NYC R Statistical Meetup. Starting as a small group meeting in a crowded conference room, Josh Reich established the meetup as the premiere gathering of data geeks in the tri-state area. Over the past year we have had 10 meetups, and two more ... [Read more...]

The video from John Myles White’s outstanding introductory talk on spatial analysis with R to the NYC R Statistical Meetup is now available in the R video repository, and is also embedded after the jump. I would like to thank John for this fantastic talk, and for those interested ... [Read more...]

Recently, Patrick Meier, PhD candidate at Tufts University and member of the Ushahidi Advisory Board, provided me with a dataset containing the first 72 hours of reports registered with Ushahidi in Port-au-Prince after the January 12th earthquake. First, a huge thank you to Patrick for providing me with this data and ... [Read more...]

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Today I finished uploading a couple new talks to the growing repository of online presentations from the NYC R Statistical Meetup. Going forward, my plan is—whenever possible—to make all talks and presentation materials available online, in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible. Our volunteer ... [Read more...]

Last night I was one of five speakers at the NYC R Statistical Programming Meetup. The topic last night was dubbed the R Rosetta Stone, and the intent was to show how R as a language translated into several other analytical platforms and programming languages. Other speakers covered MATLAB, SAS, ... [Read more...]

Thanks to Evan Kohlman at the NEFA Foundation for compiling, and Danger Room for publicizing, the data set of all of Farouk Abdulmutallab’s posts to the Islamic Forum on Gawaher.com. Since Evan took the initiative to download and save the raw HTML data, I thought it would be ... [Read more...]