Has the time come for Jupyter/IPython notebooks in R? This format, mixing code chunks, output, and markdown all in the same interface, is already wildly popular among Python users. Here's how to get a quick start using interactive, collaborative notebooks in Jupyter, with the help of SageMathCloud. [Read more...]

Let visitors execute and play with simple R examples right on your web page, thanks to a web service and an embeddable widget provided by the Sage project. [Read more...]

Net stacked distribution graphs are a nice way of comparing data on a Likert scale. It strips out the neutral responses and centers the responses around the center of the graph so you can quickly compare agreement and disagreement on different issues. Here we'll build on Jason Becker's work on ... [Read more...]

A Poisson process provides a good model for events that happen rarely. That's what von Bortkiewicz realized in 1898 when he modeled deaths by horse kick in Prussian cavalry; since it would be ungentlemanly to actually kill my readers, I instead represent the events in a Poisson process using a horse's ... [Read more...]

The recent Sonification Handbook has a chapter devoted to exploratory data analysis using sound. With some help from Sam Ferguson, one of the chapter's authors, I've made it easy to implement those techniques using R with playitbyr. [Read more...]

Here's the numbers of yearly sunspots, 1700-1988, brought to you by the nimble marimba of R: See ?sunspot.year in R for more information about the data. I did this last spring and just discovered it again. I've been so caught up in the current sound world of playitbyr (see ... [Read more...]

Apparent Reason, my new monthly podcast, is a boisterous and non-technical discussion of economics and statistics. In that format I don't have the luxury of showing charts and graphs to complement my discussion, so I use the playitbyr package to represent the data as sound. (Apparently February is a great ... [Read more...]

(Update: The csound package is now available on CRAN.) Do your random variables need to groove more? Of course they do. That's why I've been working on the upcoming csound package for R, which connects to Csound computer synthesis software to make any sound imaginable. Your computer'll be the hippest ... [Read more...]

The Occupy Wall Street movement chants "We are the 99 percent, you are the 1 percent." It's a catchy refrain, and there are many excellent reasons to put the focus on Wall Street in the struggle for economic and political justice in the US. But even singling out one percent of the ... [Read more...]

Sparks have been flying between my favorite data analysis language and my favorite programmer's Q & A site since long ago: R flirted with StackOverflow on September 10, 2008, 5 days before StackOverflow was even open to the public. R still hesitates to leave its original suitor, the loud and lively R-help mailing list, ... [Read more...]

My greatest pleasures in mathematics come from observing--and here, listening to--the interplay of simple and complex. With a few axioms and definitions you can create surprising worlds, and in what seems like a mess you can find beautiful regularities. It's damn sexy, frankly. Here, I use a simple recursive equation ... [Read more...]

Warning message: This song contains highly suggestive coefficients and graphic depictions of exuberant R-core lovin’. “Plotting Ihaka” is based on Rotting Piñata by Sponge, and reflects a small measure of my boundless joy in the world of R. Despite being a firm proponent of muffins, I can confidently say ... [Read more...]

Today I unveil my very first statistical YouTube video! I will do anything to keep you statisfied, and if that means YouTube, then so be it. But first, some exposition: In Panama, 10 percent of the population owned 45 percent of the income in 2000, whereas the bottom 10 percent owned only 0.6 percent. How [...] [Read more...]

What happens when you mash together R‘s data crunching magic, Festival‘s speech synthesis power, and the audio wonders of the venerable music language Csound? You fall even more in love with free and open-source software, and you start hearing sounds like this: A single beat of the above ... [Read more...]

Did you wake up this morning hoping that you would be able to listen to telephone beeps inspired by Estonian web site metrics? I knew you did! First things first: I came up with the slightly crazy idea of using the bleepy sounds that telephones make, called “dual-tone multifrequency” (DTMF) ... [Read more...]

Tom Taverner introduced me to Benford’s Law as we were eating lunch together at a statistical computing conference: If you look at the first digits of data in many naturally-occuring datasets, a startling 30 percent of them are ones. “Pah!” I said. “That belies intuition! Why would one digit occur ... [Read more...]