Estimating required hospital bed capacity requires a thorough analysis. There are a lot of ways of approaching a capacity requirement problem, but I think we can agree that a simple spreadsheet analysis just won't cut it. The approach described in this post makes use of discrete-event simulation and, just ... [Read more...]

Discrete-event simulation is a very useful tool when it comes to simulating alternative scenario’s for current of future business operations. Let’s take the following case; Patients of an outpatient diabetes clinic are complaining about long waiting times, this seems to have an adverse effect on patient satisfaction and ... [Read more...]

I have a little delinquent on this whole blogging thing but here is a talk I gave to the DC R Group. On a twisted and Rpy2 web application framework that I built for my company. Enjoy http://bit.ly/NW0Neg J [Read more...]

  The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent.  In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev,… Read more › [Read more...]

There are quite a few books out now on “data science”. I’ve picked out three that I think are the best place to start for computational journalists. First is Machine Learning for Hackers, by Drew Conway and John Myles White. The autho... [Read more...]

It has been month and a half since I compiled a list of statistical/programming internet flotsam and jetsam. Via Lambda The Ultimate: Evaluating the Design of the R Language: Objects and Functions For Data Analysis (PDF). A very detailed evaluation … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Both R and Python have facilities where the coder can write a script which requests a user to input some information. In Python 2.6, the main function for this task is raw_input (in Python 3.0, it’s input()). In R, there are a series of functions that can be used to ... [Read more...]

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It has been a strange last ten days since we unexpectedly entered grant writing mode. I was looking forward to work on this issue near the end of the year but a likely change on funding agency priorities requires applying … Continue reading → [Read more...]

ThinkStats (by Allen B. Downey) is a good book to get you familiar with statistics (and even Python, if you’ve done some scripting in other languages). I thought it would be interesting to present some of the examples & exercises in the book in R. Why? Well, once you’ve ... [Read more...]

This coming Monday we start the first semester in Canterbury (and in New Zealand for that matter). We are all looking forward to an earthquake-free year; more realistically, I’d be happy with low magnitude aftershocks. The Wall Street Journal reports … Continue reading → [Read more...]

My Paris colleague (and fellow-runner) Aurélien Garivier has produced an interesting comparison of 4 (or 6 if you consider scilab and octave as different from matlab) computer languages in terms of speed for producing the MLE in a hidden Markov model, using EM and the Baum-Welch algorithms. His conclusions are that ... [Read more...]

Two posts ago we showed you the digit sound system for remembering numbers. This week we provide two computer programs to help you create mnemonics. [Read more...]

Here is an interview with Kai Chew, Founder of Cloudstat. CloudStat is developing a cloud-based statistical platform to help researchers who want to make sense of data to do statistical analysis collaboratively with its high performance computing infra... [Read more...]

I will assume you have read through part 1 and have the csv file loaded. While we covered some basic graphing in the last post i hope to get into a little more of the data crunching. Specifically I am interested in the names which where driven by a spe... [Read more...]

This is the first walk-through I have posted. Reading these types of posts has been incredibly helpful as I have been learning R and other useful tools in the Unix universe. Hopefully you find it helpful. First, I have been watching Google Python Video... [Read more...]

This week we rolled out a new release at cloudnumbers.com which implements two new main features: cloudnumbers.com now supports Batch processing. Due to some changes in the architecture we were able to reduce our system requirements. In detail, we do not need that much open ports in your ... [Read more...]

Today, programmers have to deal with multi-core and multi-computer technologies. Several people claim that software developers are far behind hardware technologies. My two favorite posts for this statement are Editor’s Desk: Software Lags Behind Hardware, But That’s a Good Thing A Hacker’s Craic -Why is software so ... [Read more...]

Seriously … why don’t math classes use computers? Excel, simple Python scripts, Mathematica / Sage, everything beyond the TI-83. Kids could be creating totally sweet visuals instead of cribbing formulae. And thinking instead of copying. I can sa... [Read more...]

“We have seen that a perfect correlation is perfectly linear, so an imperfect correlation will be `imperfectly linear’.” page 128 This book has been written by two linguists, Shravan Vasishth and Michael Broe, in order to teach statistics “in  areas that are traditionally not mathematically demanding” at a deeper level than ... [Read more...]