Rahm Emanuel is now Mayor of Chicago, having successfully defended a court challenge to his candidacy and then 5 rivals in the February 22 election. The Chicago Tribune has put together an interactive map of the results (color-coded by the winner in each precinct), but for R hackers who would like to ... [Read more...]

The Web-based Flash game Canabalt, whose scores have been analyzed by R before, is now available as an iOS App. Because the app is configured to work on three different platforms: the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch; and because players are invited to tweet their best scores at the end ... [Read more...]

Free dating site OkCupid (which was recently acquired by match.com) collects a lot of data. With over 3 million members, many of whom have provided extensive information about their personal details including preferences, lifestyle, sexuality and hobbies via their dating profiles, they have a wealth of information upon which to ... [Read more...]

Coronary artery disease (CAD) results in blockages to the blood vessels that supply the heart and, if left untreated, can lead to heart attacks and even death. In fact, CAD is the leading cause of death in North America and many other countries. It's important to detect CAD as soon ... [Read more...]

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, and to put the scale of the event in context San Francisco bureau chief for New Scientist magazine and data journalist Peter Aldhous created a time-lapse animation of all large earthquakes in the last year, beginning with the 7.0-magnitude Haiti event. ... [Read more...]

The winners of the Mozilla Open Data Visualization competition "How Do People Use Firefox" have been announced. The competition attracted 32 entries, each visualizing an aspect of data collected in the Mozilla Test Pilot program to reveal insights about how people use the popular open-source browser Firefox. I was honoured to ... [Read more...]

Jesse Bridgewater works on "social search awesomeness" for the Bing search engine, and is setting up his dev environment with the necessary tools including python, vim, and R. Jesse has shared a handy script he uses to install all the specialty packages he uses for his data analysis. This is ... [Read more...]

The Facebook Data Team has published an analysis of the status updates of Facebook users, by categorizing words according to the 68 categories of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Dictionary, and tabulating the frequencies of their use. It's fairly interesting to see this kind of analysis applied to Facebook, but ... [Read more...]

There was a small earthquake in northern England on Tuesday. Barry Rowlingson felt the quake (it rattled the photographs on his wall), but didn't know how big of a quake it was because he didn't know how close he was to the epicentre. The British Geological Survey hadn't yet announced ... [Read more...]

Positional bias — the tendency for users to preferentially select results in the first few positions of a search — is a big issue for all kinds of search engines. But for online travel site Orbitz the stakes are higher than for a traditional Web search engine: if a customer chooses the ... [Read more...]

In a presentation to the Chicago R User Group last night, Drew Conway used his new Infochimps package in R to assess the relative popularity of programming languages. Drew used the word.stats function in the Infochimps package to count the frequency of common computer languages mentioned in Twitter messages, ... [Read more...]

Last night at the Bay Area UseR Group meeting, Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief of New Scientist Magazine, gave an inspiring presentation about Data Driven Journalism. Even though the newspaper industry is faltering as a business model, there's a beacon of light: journalists can be the driving force behind ... [Read more...]

One of the current best tools in the machine learning toolbox is the 1930s statistical technique called logistic regression. We explain how to add professional quality logistic regression to your analytic repertoire and describe a bit beyond that. A statistical analyst working on data tends to deliberately start simple move ... [Read more...]

Yesterday's US election is pretty much over now: most of the results are in, the pundits have offered their political analysis, and there's even been a bit of mathematical analysis of the results, too. But last night as the results were flowing in, R user Brock Tibert just wanted to ... [Read more...]

The winners of this year's ggplot2 case study competition have been announced. I was honoured to be asked to be a judge of the competition this year, but it was a difficult job with so many excellent entries. In the end, the judging panel (which included Heike Hoffman and Hadley ... [Read more...]

When Google introduced Google Instant (where search results are displayed as you type), it was certainly a boon for searchers. Personally, I've started visiting the Google homepage after years of just using the search box in Firefox (and now Chrome), and enjoying the improved search experience. (And I get to ... [Read more...]

Over at the Mozilla Metrics blog, Mozillan Hamilton Ulmer uses R and ggplot2 to look at when people (or at least, Firefox users that volunteered to share their usage data) enable private browsing. Turns out it isn't just "porn mode" after all: the main use turns out to be lunchtime ... [Read more...]

In the early days of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the rate of flow of oil from the spill was of great concern: estimating it accurately was key to coordinating the scale and scope of the response to the emergency. Unfortunately, estimates from independent sources ... [Read more...]

We've looked before at how you can annotate geographical maps using R, but what if you want to overlay data onto a globe of the Earth, using Google Earth? The RKML package for R (from the OmegaHat project) allows you to do just that, by providing a high-level interface from ... [Read more...]

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. As slashdot slowly loses its relevance and digg heads for a more general audience to head off competition from Twitter, loyal readers of uber-technical news aggregator Hacker News wonder if it's heading the same way. Seems like the long-standing users aren't posting links ... [Read more...]