A post on high-dimensional arrays by @isomorphisms reminded me of APL and, more generally, of matrix languages, which took me back to inquisitive computing: computing not in the sense of software engineering, or databases, or formats, but of learning by poking problems through a computer. I like languages not because ... [Read more...]

I was having a conversation with an acquaintance about courses that were particularly useful in our work. My forestry degree involved completing 50 compulsory + 10 elective† courses; if I had to choose courses that were influential and/or really useful they would be Operations Research, Economic Evaluation of Projects, Ecology, 3 Calculus and 2 ... [Read more...]

This post is tangential to R, although R has a fair share of the issues I mention here, which include research reproducibility, open source, paying for software, multiple languages, salt and pepper. There is an increasing interest in the reproducibility … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I try to be economical when writing code; for example, I tend to use single quotes over double quotes for characters because it saves me one keystroke. One area where I don’t do that is when typing TRUE and FALSE … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The email wasn’t a challenge but a simple question: Is it possible to run a multivariate analysis in multiple sites? I was going to answer yes, of course, and leave it there but it would be a cruel, non-satisfying answer. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I can’t exactly remember how I arrived to Making sense of random effects, a good post in the Distributed Ecology blog (go over there and read it). Incidentally, my working theory is that I follow Scott Chamberlain (@recology_), who follows … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I’ve ignored my quantitative geneticist side of things for a while (at least in this blog) so this time I’ll cover some code I was exchanging with a couple of colleagues who work for other organizations. It is common to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I have written a few posts discussing descriptive analyses of evaluation of National Standards for New Zealand primary schools.The data for roughly half of the schools was made available by the media, but the full version of the dataset is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Eric and I have been exchanging emails about potential analyses for the school data and he published a first draft model in Offsetting Behaviour. I have kept on doing mostly data exploration while we get a definitive full dataset, and … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I like the idea of having data on school performance, not to directly rank schools—hard, to say the least, at this stage—but because we can start having a look at the factors influencing test results. I imagine the opportunity in … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Oddities tend to jump out when one uses software in a daily basis. The situation is even clearer when using software for teaching: many more people looking at it with fresh eyes. Let’s say that we are fitting a simple … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This is one of those times of the year: struggling to keep the head above the water, roughly one month before the last lecture of the semester. On top trying to squeeze trips, meetings and presentations in between while dealing … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Suicide is a tragic and complex problem. This week New Zealand’s Chief Coroner released its annual statistics on suicide, which come with several tables and figures. One of those figures refers to monthly suicides in the Christchurch region (where I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Today Scott Chamberlain tweeted asking for a better/faster solution to building an m x n matrix with randomly assigned 0/1. He already had a working version: Now, I’m the first to acknowledge that I’ve never got the ‘apply’ family of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Reached mid-semester point, with quite a few new lectures to prepare. Nothing extremely complicated but, as always, the tricky part is finding a way to make it meaningful and memorable. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, I sound … Continue reading → [Read more...]

INLA is not the Norwegian answer to ABBA; that would probably be a-ha. INLA is the answer to ‘Why do I have enough time to cook a three-course meal while running MCMC analyses?”. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA) is based … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When running stats labs I like to allocate a slightly different subset of data to each student, which acts as an incentive for people to do their own work (rather than copying the same results from a fellow student). We … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Back teaching a couple of subjects and it’s the constant challenge to find enough common ground with students so one can push/pull them to the other side of new concepts. We are not talking about complex hierarchical models using mixed … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Disappeared for a while collecting frequent flyer points. In the process I ‘discovered’ that I live in the middle of nowhere, as it took me 36 hours to reach my conference destination (Estoril, Portugal) through Christchurch, Sydney, Bangkok, Dubai, Madrid … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I like statistics and I struggle with statistics. Often times I get frustrated when I don’t understand and I really struggled to make sense of Krushke’s Bayesian analysis of a split-plot, particularly because ‘it didn’t look like’ a split-plot to … Continue reading → [Read more...]