This weekend brought a couple of firsts in Cardiff’s winner against Norwich After a wretched time at Manchester United, Wilfried Zaha recorded his first Premiership assist, whilst, more interestingly, Craig Bellamy became the first player in history to score for seven different Premier League clubs To celebrate, I thought ... [Read more...]

In 2010, Crystal Palace FC were in administration and had 10 points deducted during the year. They only survived in the Championship on the last day of the season A year ago, they started the league with three consecutive losses and were relegation favourites. Fast forward 12 months and they are again strong ... [Read more...]

The guys developing rCharts continue to release enhancements by the day and I have taken advantage to update a couple of Shiny apps The CRAN download app now sports the new exporter feature so that any chart a user comes up with can be saved as a SVG vector, PNG ... [Read more...]

I have been meaning for some time to get stuck into the rCharts package which provides an interface to many Javascript graphic libraries. These offer rich charting capabilities with interactivity and a great deal of customization. As regular readers will know, I am also interested in improved publicity for CRAN ... [Read more...]

Over the past few days, I have been introduced to a few new-to-me R packages, via some comments from the Shiny guys and the R-bloggers site. This seems a rather haphazard way of acquiring knowledge and I cannot be alone in thinking that this is not the most productive way ... [Read more...]

I have had some work on CRAN stats on the back-burner but the recent article How R Grows tempted me to push it up the list In the interim, I have a couple of comments on Joseph Rickert`s article. Although the body of the article refers to packages either ... [Read more...]

A few days ago there was an interesting R based article by diffuseprior on the decline and fall in the quality of The Simpsons The author scraped results from GEOS, an online survey of TV programs, and applied the R package changepoint to offer an analysis of the show over ... [Read more...]

Not the start Blue Jays fans were looking for. With a 6-9 record at the time of publication they already trail Boston (led by reviled ex-BJ manager, John Farrell) by 4.5 games. The batting has been particularly anemic but the pitching – particularly the starting rotation – has also been a concern I ... [Read more...]

For years, the Blue Jays have been also-rans in the AL East but splashed out this season turning prospects into established stars in the hope of reaching the World Series Seven games in and the 2-5 start has the perennial doubts resurfacing, particularly as none of the much-vaunted starters has ... [Read more...]

A great. recent enhancement for the Shiny App is the ability to upload local files. Now, in addition to users being able to interact with data provided on the host e.g. Soccer Tables or via the web, Wikipedia Search Rates they can use apps to view and analyse their ... [Read more...]

The Shiny package provides great user interactivity and another boost to its attractiveness has come with its integration with googleVis. Markus Gesman provides some background in a blog article with coded examples which he along with fellow googleVis creator, Diego de Castillo and lead Shiny developer Winson Chang have furnished ... [Read more...]

As you probably know, I am one of the strongest proponents of the Shiny package for developing interactive web applications Amongst the latest news from RStudio is that what was planned to be commercial software will now be free and Open Source (AGPLv3 license) To celebrate this momentous announcement, I ... [Read more...]

Several of you will probably have tried out the new Shiny package brought to the table by the RStudio guys This is just what I have been looking for and to my mind could provide a quantum leap in the use of R. There have been other packages addressing the ... [Read more...]

Well, one election is over but it is never too soon to start another – or in this case revisit the past four years One day after the 2008 US Presidential election, there was a Rasmussen poll taken of 1000 likely voters asking for their choice for the 2012 Republican Presedential Candidate. The overwhelming ... [Read more...]

I recently posted an article on how to collate Wikipedia page views As there is a time component to this, it seemed appropriate to use the googleVis Package to visualize changes in page hits in the Google Motion chart For this exercise, I ran the wikiFun function covered in the ... [Read more...]

No the title doesn’t refer to how Katy Perry suffered at another of Jimmy Savile’s sexual predelictions, although these are two of  the participants. I’ll get to the details later Just over a year ago, I reflected on the relative wiki searches of leading female singing celebrities, ... [Read more...]

Timelines can be quite a handy way of getting an overview of a player’s career in terms of when they played, with which team and who were their contemporaries As often is the case, I turned to Stackoverflow to set me on my way for an R solution. In ... [Read more...]

I use R aplenty in analysis and thought it might be worthwhile for some to see the typical process a relative newcomer goes through in extracting and analyzing public datasets In this instance I happen to be looking at Canadian air pollution statistics. The data I am interested in is ... [Read more...]

With none of the top teams overimpressing this season, Alan Pardew’s performance with Newcastle – especially in the transfer market -is likely to see him receive coniderable recognition in the Manager of the Year award Recent acquisition, Papiss Cissé, has proved particularly fruitful with a brace against Swansea last time ... [Read more...]

I am quite interested in both Wars with sabres and Sabremetric WARs but the War I am most involved in is the card game. Unfortunately, it is one my six year old favourites and he is quite happy to while away the hours (literally) playing it with anyone pressganged into ... [Read more...]