Posts Tagged Data

Lists and Loops in R

Following up on some work Gabriel has been doing, here’s a way to accomplish the same sort of thing, with less reliance on loops and more on functions that work on lists. Also, a way to manage the conversion of the .png files to an animated .gif without having to manually rename files. As I […]


Easily display information about R objects in Emacs/ESS

I found this post that provides a nice function for conveniently showing some information about R objects in ESS mode. ESS already shows some information about functions as you type them (in the status bar) but this has wider scope. Move the point over an R object (a function, a data frame, etc), hit C-c […]


Naturalizing the Social, and Vice Versa

Via Cosma Shalizi, reports of a very interesting piece of work: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour, C. Eisenegger, M. Naef, R. Snozzi, M. Heinrichs & E. Fehr, Nature 463, 356-359 (21 January 2010). The abstract:

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has […]


Looking at Data

Jeremy Freese is doing some analysis:

So, the General Social Survey reinterviewed a large subset of 2006 respondents in 2008. They have released the data that combines into one file the respondents interviewed for the first time in 2008 and the 2008 reinterviews of the respondents originally interviewed in 2006. In a separate file, of course, […]


Posted
12 October 2009 @ 7pm

Tagged
Data

Make Shift-Enter do a lot in ESS

If you use Emacs and ESS to run R, then here’s a nice tweak I found on the Emacs Wiki. The following bit of elisp goes in your .emacs file (or equivalent). Starting with an R file in the buffer, hitting shift-enter vertically splits the window and starts R in the right-side buffer. If R […]


Rotten Borough

Via a FB friend:

As of April 1, 2006, out of a 2004 Census estimated population of 18 in Teterboro, there were 39 registered voters (216.7% of the population, vs. 55.4% in all of Bergen County).

Sadly, the answer may be prosaic. From earlier in the same Wikipedia entry:

The 2000 census failed to count any of the […]


Posted
2 January 2009 @ 8pm

Tagged
Data

Visualizing WPA Spending

Over on the Edge of the American West, Eric has been working up some graphs on what the WPA spent its money on. Eric’s own presentation of the data showed clearly that the WPA spent much more of money on highways roads and streets than anything else—so much so, in fact, that graphing it directly […]


Randy Newman was right

Studies of network contagion in health outcomes and behaviors (such as obesity and smoking) are all the rage these days. So it is interesting to read this paper in the current BMJ by Cohen-Cole and Fletcher that uses Add-Health data to establish some statistically significant but substantively rather implausible effects of just this sort:
Objective To […]


Netflix Weirdness

There’s an article on the Netflix Prize in the Times today. You know, where Netflix made half of its ratings data available to people and offered a million bucks to anyone who could write a recommendation algorithm that would do some specified percent better than Netflix’s own. What tripped me up was this sentence about […]


Make-work

I’m so far behind on this one. Here’s a figure based on a table Eric sent me.

There is a PDF version. There is also a 4-category version (with a PDF too), that breaks out farm workers from the main category.


Workflow Update

My periodically-updated guide to choosing your workflow applications has received one of its periodic updates. It has grown an abstract and more up-to-date stuff on backups and versioning. Plus extra jokes. Click through to read—you may have to reload it if you have an old version lurking in your browser cache. This release is officially […]


Git Bibs

Over the past few months, I’ve been messing around with Git and Mercurial, two modern, distributed version control systems (DVCSs). While designed by software engineers, these systems are very useful to people who, like me, write papers and do data analysis in some plain-text file format or other, who very often revise those files, sometimes […]


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