We’ve noticed through the magic of download statistics that we have a nice cluster of listeners in the DC metro area. With Patrick always nearby and Ryan in town for a bit, we figured a meet up would be fun. So on Thursday, January 9th, starting around 7:30pm EST ... [Read more...]

I promised in Episode 166 that I’d review this beer with a bit more detail than my usual quick spiel on the show, so allow me to present: End of the World Midnight Wheat! An ale brewed with “midnight wheat, chocolate malt, chili and spice” from Shock Top (aka Anheuser-Busch) ... [Read more...]

Guess what?! Charlie decided to institute another round of the epic Flyer Contest! Here’s how it works in 5 easy steps… Print out one of the two flyers below (or this link: here) Post it somewhere public. Examples include: a message board in your department, at your local comic shop, ... [Read more...]

I like politics; I don’t like all of the lying involved.  If you ask me, I think that there should be “Ethics Committee” investigations into all of the lying.  Sure, tweeting a picture of your junk is probably not the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Last Saturday I had the good fortune to present a talk on finding, gathering, and analyzing some sports-related data on the web at the local SABR group meeting.  In case you’re not familiar with the “SABR” acronym, it stands for … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A week or so ago I saw a tweet related how the NFL lockout was affecting the search traffic for “fantasy football” on Google (using Google Trends).  Basically, the search traffic (properly normalized on Google Trends) was down prior to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Last night I presented a talk at the DRUG introducing the R wrapper for the Data Science Toolkit.  Lots of good questions, good forking, and good beer afterwards at Freshcraft.  The slides are given below. [Read more...]

I recently decided to present a talk to the Denver R Users Group (DRUG) on how to make an R package (May 17). There were only two problems: (1) I’ve never made a package and (2) I had nothing in mind … Continue reading → [Read more...]

[Note: I wrote this on a flight and didn't proofread it at all. You've been warned of possibly incoherencies!] I’m currently sitting at about 32K feet above sea level on my way from Tampa International to DIA and my options … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I decided to spend a few hours this weekend writing the R code to scrape the individual statistics of NBA players (2010-11 only).  I originally planned to write up a few NBA-related analyses, but a friend was visiting from out … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This past Tuesday I had the opportunity to present a short talk (a bit long) related to text mining at the Los Angeles R Users’ Group. Since I do most of my text mining in Python, I took this opportunity to discuss RPy2, an interface to R from Python. My ... [Read more...]

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I compared the results of my fantasy football draft with the results of more than 1500 mock drafts at the Fantasy Football Calculator (FFC).  I looked at where player X was drafted in our league, subtracted off the average draft … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A while back I posted something about scraping a webpage using the BeautifulSoup module in Python.  One of the comments to that post was by Larry — a blogger over at IEORTools — suggesting that I take a look at … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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I have to admit that working with my Major League Soccer data set has been slow going.  There are a few reasons:  (1) I have a full-time job at the National Renewable Energy Lab and (2) the data isn’t quite … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I promised something related to Major League Soccer and here it is.  Caveat:  It’s not much.  Why so sparse?  (1) The data is a bit messy due to teams folding, expansion, name changes, etc.  (2)  I was backpacking all weekend and didn’t have time to work on this side project.  ... [Read more...]

I have to say that it’s pretty exciting to watch your blog go from a few hits over its lifetime to getting almost 200 in a single day.  I am currently negotiating with Google over the purchase of this blog.  Or maybe not.  Again, thanks be to @revodavid for posting ... [Read more...]