Now that the 2010 survey is over, you might be wondering what we can learn from the data when the aggregated results are published. For a good guide to the kinds of questions you'll be able to answer, take a look at StatJump, where you can see tables and charts of ... [Read more...]

Ever wondered which Twitterers you and a friend share? Using R and the twitteR package, there's an easy way to find out. Cornelius Puschmann hacked together some R code to do just that for the Humanities and Technology Camp and it seems to work pretty well. Just replace 'coffee001' ... [Read more...]

Tuesday's meeting of the Bay Area R UseR Group at the LinkedIn offices was a great event. The headline speaker was Joe Adler, author of the excellent R reference manual, R in a Nutshell. Joe's presentation was an in-depth look at the relative speed of various options in R for ... [Read more...]

What's the secret to the best pizza in New York? That's what statistical consultant and R user Jared Lander sought to find out, by analyzing the rankings of NY pizza joints at MenuPages.com, and building a regression model for ratings based on variables like localion, price, number of reviews, ... [Read more...]

Physicist and weather scientist Joe Wheatley used R to design and create a useful visual representation of how drought affects a region over long time-scales. Instead of charting absolute rainfall (or lack thereof), he instead charts the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), where extreme values (above 2 or below -2) indicate extreme ... [Read more...]

At the Information Management blog, Steve Miller has provided two great reviews (here and here) of last week's Predictive Analytics World conference, including a recap of the Bay Area User's Group meeting featuring John Chambers. (My personal highlight from John's talk? A photograph of the very first sketch of what ... [Read more...]

The blog Offensive Politics has done some in-depth analysis of the recent Senate special-election upset in Massachusetts, comparing the results of victorious Republican candidate Scott Brown to those of the unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. It's pretty clear that Brown out-performed expectations with Democratic voters, but this chart ... [Read more...]

The slides and videos from Jeff Horner's talk at last week's Bay Area User Group session on R-Powered Web Apps are now available. I've embedded it here below, but you might want to click through to larger size for better readability on the slides. Jeff's talk (titled "Use Rapache! It ... [Read more...]

The US National Centers for Environment Prediction (NCEP) produces weather forecasts for the entire world from a model that's updated every 6 hours. The data is made freely available, and with a couple of free tools to convert the data and R you can easily produce am unpdated global weather forecast ... [Read more...]