The population of the world has been over 7 billion for about a year now. But those seven billion aren't distributed equally around the globe. 1.2 billion people — about in India alone (despite it havingjust 2% of the world's land area). At the other end of the spectrum, the entire continent of Australia ... [Read more...]

Sometimes, as with cross-validation, one needs to generate k partitions, each with an equal number of observations. There are probably an infinite number of ways this could be done in R, but the Gist below illustrates one way to do it in four lines, w... [Read more...]

One-Way ANOVA Analysis of variance is a tool used for a variety of purposes. Applications range from a common one-way ANOVA, to experimental blocking, to more complex nested designs. This first ANOVA example provides the necessary tools to analyze data using this technique. This example will show a basic one-way ... [Read more...]

Dr. Patrick Burns is the founder of Burns Statistics, providing consulting and bespoke software specializing in quantitative finance, programming in the S language, and optimization via genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. Patrick has written m... [Read more...]

If you dig around enough on Amazon.com, you can find some pretty odd products (like the Badonkadonk tank now sadly unavailable). Attached to these products you can often find a new form of comedy: the funny Amazon review. The products that attract such attention can be hard to fathom: ... [Read more...]

Check them out. Here are thirty homoskedastic ones: __ homo.wiener for (j in 1:30) {  for (i in 2:length(homo.wiener)) {          homo.wiener[i,j] for (j in 1:30) {        plot( homo.wiener[,j],           type = "l", col = rgb(.1,.... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

As you may know, today is Pi Day, when all good nerds take a moment to thank the geeks of antiquity for their painstaking work in estimating this marvelous mathematical constant. It is also a great opportunity to thank contemporary geeks for the wonders of modern computing, which allow us ... [Read more...]

Recently on his blog (here), Robin mentioned an amazing book, called "A Million Random Digits" published by RAND corporation. The book was initially published in 1955, but RAND published a nice (and expensive) second edition. A great thing is that ... [Read more...]

My friend Michael Bommarito has been doing the data community quite a service, capturing and sharing all of the traffic on Twitter related to the Iranian protests. Specifically, he has all of the tweets containing the #25bahman hast-tag, and made them available for anyone to download. I am unable to ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

In a few weeks I will be visiting Chicago, and JD Long—the organizer of the local R users group—has graciously invited me to give a presentation. Ostensibly, the presentation will be on my recently released infochimps package, so I thought it was a good time to start actually ... [Read more...]

Here's a clever way to express your objection to the obtrusiveness of the new backscatter X-ray scanners at airports: A T-shirt with the text of the 4th Amendment printed in metallic ink: Also available in underwear format. Cargo Collective: 4th Amendment Wear [Read more...]

A huge mass of rock hurtling in from space could really make a mess of your weekend plans. So it's comforting to know that the world's astronomers are out there keeping an eye for any potential earth-grazers. See their discoveries over the past 30 years in this beautifully-designed animation: Earth crossers ... [Read more...]

I saw this on in a random image stream and it made me chuckle: A little googling suggests MathematiciansPictures.com is the source, where you can also get Heisenberg on a mug. Whether your coffee is in or outside the mug is, unfortunately, indetermin... [Read more...]

On the BBC Horizon programme in 1964, Arthur C Clarke made some predictions about the future. He prefaced his predictions with the following caveat: If, by some miracle, a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so farfetched, that ... [Read more...]

Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, died Thursday at the age of 85. His obituary in the New York Times covers his life and work, and is also a well-written introduction to fractals. Mandelbrot's famous book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, was an inspiration to me in high school: that ... [Read more...]

As a gay guy, you sometimes have to put up with some pretty offensive stereotypes that get thrown your way by extremists in the community and the media. These stereotypes are usually deployed in the form of anecdotes about how gay people are "promiscuous" or "corrupting". These misrepresentative anecdotes have ... [Read more...]

I was brought up in Australia, where we got rid of 1¢ and 2¢ coins in my childhood. Nobody missed them, at least as I recall. I certainly didn't: they were useless, even at the age when I might by lollies (candy) for 2¢ apiece. But then again, I'd never buy one, and ... [Read more...]