There has been some interest in the recent release of RStudio 0.96 and especially the ability to use combine its knitr Markdown functionality with Pandoc to integrate R and a variety of different documents types. I just wanted to add two quick things ...

This morning I came across a post which discusses the differences between scala, ruby and python when trying to analyse time series data. Essentially, there is a text file consisting of times in the format HH:MM and we want to get an idea of its distribution. Tom discusses how ...

…was the tongue-in-cheek title of an image that I posted to Twitpic this week. It shows the usage of the word “novel” in PubMed article titles over time. As someone correctly pointed out at FriendFeed, it needs to be corrected for total publications per year. It was inspired by a ...

Egon writes: Can someone please plot the BioStar users on a Google Map? Sounds like a challenge. Let’s go. 1. Harvesting user IP addresses BioStar user profiles (here’s mine) include a location field. It’s free text and optional, which means that location is missing or inaccurate for many ...

One of the top searches on rubyflow is “conference”.  A recent post showed how to create a map with the location of the 2010 R User Conference.  So why not expand on the subject and create a map with numerous conference locations thr...

The iris data set pops up pretty regularly in statistical literature.  It consists of 50 records from three species of Iris flowers (Iris setosa, Iris virginica and Iris versicolor).   I came across it recently while reading Introduction to Data Mining.   It comes up in several places in the book to demonstrate ...

I have found myself over the years in a rather awkward situation.  I work in old-school, bricks and mortar industry IT shops for the most part.  However, I love many open source projects and identify with many of the values of start up cultur...

I love R.  It is really a great language and platform for statistical work and graphing.  But every technology has its limits - and other tools can be meet different needs.  So in this post, I will start with R and move on to the JavaScr...

Part of what attracted me to R was the ease and efficiency in using the language for tasks for which it was designed.  R is a tool among that can be used to do great things with minimal effort.  This post illustrates some other tools and tech...

Ruby is best known as the language behind the rails web application framework. However, it is a very flexible general purpose language that can be used for tasks of direct interest to R Developers (parsing files, interacting with databases, processing...

If you want to interact with other programming languages from R, there are various packages and bindings available. These packages provide a pretty high degree of integration between the langages and allow you to pass objects back and forth seemlessl...

Ruby is well known for its terse syntax and ability to process web services. I prefer JSON (Javascript Object Notation) to XML whenever possible. For example, a script to retrieve a list of World Bank Data takes all of three lines of code (after in...

As you probably figured out, I am an Amazon affiliate and have been giving some thought to how to get the best lists of R books available at Amazon. To get the list of ISBNs from R-Project, the following Ruby script did the trick:require 'rubygems'req...

Networks – social and biological – are all the rage, just now. Indeed, a recent entry at Duncan’s QOTD described the “hairball” network representation as the dominant cultural icon in molecular biology. I’ve not had occasion to explore networks “professionally”, but have always been fascinated by both networks and the ...