A story about one of the retail chains (J.C. Penny) releasing their list of stores closing in 2017 crossed paths with my Feedly reading list today and jogged my memory that there were a number of chains closing many of their doors this year, and I wanted to see the ...

I’ve been threatening to do a series on “data science community security” for a while and had cause to issue this inaugural post today. It all started with this: Hey #rstats folks: don't do this. Srsly. Don't do this. Pls. Will blog why. Just don't do this. https://t....

The kind folks over at @RStudio gave a nod to my recently CRAN-released epidata package in their January data package roundup and I thought it might be useful to give it one more showcase using the recent CRAN update to ggalt and the new hrbrthemes (github-only for now) packages. Labor ...

splashr has gained some new functionality since the introductory post. First, there’s a whole new Docker image for it that embeds a local web server. Why? The main request for it was to enable rendering of htmlwidgets: But if you use the new Docker image and the add_tempdir=...

Presented without exposition (since it’s a silly Geom) This particular ❤️ math pilfered this morning from @dmarcelinobr:

I’m uncontainably excited to report that the ggplot2 extension package ggalt is now on CRAN. The absolute best part of this package is the R community members who contributed suggestions and new geoms, stats, annotations and integration features. This release would not be possible without the PRs from: Ben ...

If you do enough web scraping, you’ll eventually hit a wall that the trusty httr verbs (that sit beneath rvest) cannot really overcome: dynamically created content (via javascript) on a site. If the site was nice enough to use XHR requests to load the dynamic content, you can generally ...

I made a promise to someone that my next blog would be about stringi vs stringr and I intend to keep said promise. stringr and stringi do “string operations”: find, replace, match, extract, convert, transform, etc. The stringr package is now part of the tidyverse and is 100% focused on string ...

I was enthused to see a mention of this on the GDELT blog since I’ve been working on an R package dubbed newsflash to work with the API that the form front-ends. Given the current climate, I feel compelled to note that I’m neither a Clinton supporter/defender/...

Dear Leader has made good on his campaign promise to “crack down” on immigration from “dangerous” countries. I wanted to both see one side of the impact of that decree — how many potential immigrants per year might this be impacting — and show toss up some code that shows how to ...

I had started a “52 Vis” initiative back in 2016 to encourage folks to get practice making visualizations since that’s the only way to get better at virtually anything. Life got crazy, 52 Vis fell to the wayside and now there are more visible alternatives such as Makeover Monday and Workout Wednesday. ...

It’s Davos time again. Each year the World Economic Forum (WEF) gathers the global elite together to discuss how they’re going to shape our collective future. WEF also releases their annual Global Risks Report at the same time. I read it every year and have, in the past, ...

The rest of the month is going to be super-hectic and it’s unlikely I’ll be able to do any more to help the push to CRAN 10K, so here’s a breakdown of CRAN and GitHub new packages & package updates that I felt were worth raising awareness on: ...

Despite being in cybersecurity nigh forever (a career that quickly turns one into a determined skeptic if you’re doing your job correctly) I have often trusted various (not to be named) news sources, reports and data sources to provide honest and as-unbiased-as-possible information. The debacle in the U.S. ...