A few more comments on the specific entry on ABC written by Mikael Sunnåker et al…. The entry starts with the representation of the posterior probability of an hypothesis, rather than with the posterior density of a model parameter, which seems to lead the novice reader astray. After all, (... [Read more...]

Robin Ryder pointed out to me this new experiment run by PLoS since March 2012, namely the introduction of a new article type, “called “Topic Pages” and written in the style of a Wikipedia article“. Not only this terrific idea gives more credence to Wikipedia biology pages, at least in their ... [Read more...]

Wikimania 2011 came to a close yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with Wikimania it may be described as UseR for Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki all rolled into one. The conference brings together staff, volunteer editors, volunteer developers and users of MediaWiki projects. Of specific interest to R Bloggers readers may ... [Read more...]

I have just came up with an idea how to test the wikipedia search traffic visualisation functions that I wrote about in my previous post. I decided to check if R is really gaining popularity that fast. ar [Read more...]

I have been playing with R to parse html. After reading about visualising “fantasy football” search traffic with RGoogleTrends at The Log Cabin blog I decided to write a few functions to do similar things with Wikipedia search statistics. This … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The last Le Monde puzzle made me wonder about the ternary version of the sorting algorithms, which all seem to be binary (compare x and y, then…). The problem is, given (only) a blackbox procedure that returns the relative order of three arbitrary numbers, how many steps are necessary to ... [Read more...]

Last year Wikipedia rolled out a pilot program to use Wikipedia article creation as an assignment in the classroom. Students wrote articles on a topic area and rather than turning them into a professor and forgetting about it they upload it to Wikipedia and expose it to readers around the ... [Read more...]

Kaggle has released a new data-mining challenge: use data from 10 years of Wikipedia edits in order to predict future edit rates. The dataset has been anonymized in order to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness. I have ... [Read more...]

This post is a call for both R community members and R-bloggers, to come and help make The R Programming wikibook be amazing. The R Programming wikibook is not just another one of the many free books about statistics/R, it is a community project which aims to create a ... [Read more...]