A student came with a question about how to snag data from a PDF report for analysis. Once she'd copied things her text file looked like:1 Las Vegas, NV --- 53.3 --- --- 12 Sacramento, CA --- 42.3 --- --- 23 Miami, FL --- 41.8 --- --- 34 Tucson, AZ --...

In example 7.6 we showed how to retrieve the Amazon sales rank of a book. A cron job on one of our machines grabs the sales rank hourly. We’d like to use this data to satisfy our curiosity about when and how often a book sells. A complication is that ...

The empirical cumulative density function (CDF) (section 5.1.16) is a useful way to compare distributions between populations. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (section 2.4.2) statistic D is the value of x with the maximum distance between the two curves. As an...

In honor of Amazon's official release date for the book, we offer this blog entry.Both SAS and R can be used to find the Amazon Sales Rank for a book by downloading the desired web page and ferreting out the appropriate line. This code is likely to br...