Dave Backus points me to this review by anthropologist Mike McGovern of two books by economist Paul Collier on the politics of economic development in Africa. My first reaction was that this was interesting but non-statistical so I’d have to either post it on the sister blog or wait ... [Read more...]

Using the Gutenberg Project’s free text of Don Quijote + Unix for Poets, here are the most used (non-short) words in Miguel de Cervantes’ famous work: 2167 Quijote 2145 Sancho 1331 porque 1053 respondió 1027 había  900 merced  813 vuestra  79... [Read more...]

A recent question over at BioStar asked whether abstracts returned from a PubMed search could easily be visualised as “word clouds”, using Wordle. This got me thinking about ways to solve the problem using R. Here’s my first attempt, which demonstrates some functions from the RCurl and XML packages. ... [Read more...]