In a previous post I reviewed my interactions with Python the programming language and the community following the New Years’ Python Meme that’s making the rounds on Twitter and the like. And now, I’m shamelessly stealing it to look at how I used R in 2012. I figure I ... [Read more...]

Breaking my dissertation and administrata induced silence for a small rant combining two of my favorite things – Apple Computer Inc, and simulation. Recently, the New York Times featured the article ‘Apple Confronts the Law of Large Numbers‘. The fundamental assertion? That the earnings growth and stock price of Apple cannot ... [Read more...]

A previous post of mine had suggested that, despite them being extremely similar operating systems, and really there being no clear reason why, Revolution R 5.0, which does support Red Hat Enterprise Linux, refused to work on Fedora 16. The installation failed, dependencies could not be installed, tech support was singularly unhelpful ... [Read more...]

sciseekclaimtoken-4f343317d3d60 I ran across this post at The Tree of Life entitled ‘Interesting new metagenomics paper w/ one big big big caveat – critical software not available”. The long and short of it? Paper appears in Science, has fancy new methodology, lacks the software for someone else to ... [Read more...]

Speaking of R… On the 16th, TIOBE Software released the Tiobe Index of the most popular programming languages. For the first time ever, R is in the Top 20. The top spots are, no surprise, occupied by Java and C respectively. More after the jump. The way this index is assembled ... [Read more...]

Update!: The latest version of Revolution R, which added support for RHEL 6, appears to work (it appears to at least install, run, and perform basic tasks). See this post for more details. I’ve come to enjoy using R. I had dabbled with it in the past, but found it ... [Read more...]

This seems like as good a day as any to review CrossValidated, and the whole StackExchange constellation of websites. It’s been a month since I joined, exactly, and today I also crossed the 1,000 reputation threshold on the site. So why not give my impressions of it? First, how I ... [Read more...]

I was recently inspired to comment on this blog post, asking is R is a cure for ‘mindless statistics’. Anyone whose familiar with statistics used in applied fields like epidemiology, sociology, social sciences generally will be familiar with the idea of a ‘statistical ritual’. Rather than think about the proper ... [Read more...]