## Spell Checker for R…qdap::check_spelling

September 4, 2014
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I often have had requests for a spell checker for R character vectors. The utils::aspell function can be used to check spelling but many Windows users have reported difficulty with the function. I came across an article on spelling in … Continue reading →

## Why the three biggest positive contributions to reproducible research are the iPython Notebook, knitr, and Galaxy

September 4, 2014
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There is a huge amount of interest in reproducible research and replication of results. Part of this is driven by some of the pretty major mistakes in reproducibility we have seen in economics and genomics. This has spurred discussion at a variety … Continue reading →

## No surprises

September 4, 2014
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Yesterday was the day of my talk at the RSS Conference. As I mentioned here, I hadn't been back to Sheffield for nearly 20 years, so it is really no no surprise that I found it reeeeally (I mean: really) changed. In fact, I think I'm being a victim of ...

## Why isn’t replication required before publication in top journals?

September 4, 2014
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Gabriel Power asks the above question, writing: I don’t recall seeing, on your blog or elsewhere, this question raised directly. Of course there is much talk about the importance of replication, mostly by statisticians, and economists are grudgingly following suit with top journals requiring datasets and code. But why not make it a simple requirement? […] The post Why isn’t replication required before publication in top journals? appeared first on…

## Visits: Mapping the Places you Have Visited

September 4, 2014
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Visits [v.isits.in] automatically visualizes personal location histories, trips and travels by aggregating geotagged one's Flickr collection with a Google Maps history. developed by Alice Thudt, Dominkus Baur and prof. Sheelagh Carpendale, the map run...

## Is OLS BLUE or JUNK?

September 4, 2014
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My favorite pontificators in political science is Fernando Martel Garcia. I got to know him at replication panel ISA, where he quite vigorously opposed the APSR's policy of auto-rejecting replication papers. Fernando recently posted this gem to the PolMeth mailing list. In the real world computers do not work alone but at the behest of […]

## Light entertainment: pie charts to the rescue

September 4, 2014
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My colleague sent me these. Link to the full post. I think I saw this one before:

## Ciphers, keys, and cryptoquotes

September 4, 2014
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Today is my fourth blog-iversary: the anniversary of my first blog post in 2010. To celebrate, I am going to write a series of fun posts based on The Code Book by Simon Singh, a fascinating account of the history of cryptography from ancient times until the present. While reading […]

## Stata: Detecting deviations in input on double entry data

September 4, 2014
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In this post I will present code for detecting deviations in variable values for data that has been entered twice. First I will simulate some data. Then I will detecting deviations.clearset obs 300* Define a class IDgen cID = ceil(_n/20)* This will gen...

## My Favorite Charts

September 4, 2014
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There are many charts I hate, because they're badly done, sloppy, meaningless, deceiving, ugly, or for any number of other reasons. But then there are the ones I keep coming back to because they're just so clear, well-designed, and effective. All of these are a few years old. Like a fine wine analogy that I could insert here, it probably takes a while for a chart to come up again…

## Python: Enthought Canopy Installation in Ubuntu

September 4, 2014
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Enthought Canopy is a comprehensive Python analysis environment with easy installation and updates of the proven Enthought Python distribution - all part of a robust platform you can explore, develop and visualize on. (Ref. 1)To install this, do the f...

## Mathematical Statistics Lesson of the Day – Chebyshev’s Inequality

$Mathematical Statistics Lesson of the Day – Chebyshev’s Inequality$

The variance of a random variable is just an expected value of a function of .  Specifically, . Let’s substitute into Markov’s inequality and see what happens.  For convenience and without loss of generality, I will replace the constant with another constant, . Now, let’s substitute with , where is the standard deviation of . […]

## Sampling error and non-sampling error

September 3, 2014
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The subject of statistics is rife with misleading terms. I have written about this before in such posts as Teaching Statistical Language and It is so random. But the terms sampling error and non-sampling error win the Dr Nic prize for … Continue reading →

## Adding the SPSS MEAN.n Function to R

September 3, 2014
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SPSS contains a very useful set of functions that R lacks. If you’re lucky enough to have access to SPSS, you can use SPSS and R very well together. If not, it’s easy to add these functions to R. The … Continue reading →

## Some New Add-Ins for EViews

September 3, 2014
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In my last post (here) I discussed "Add-ins" for the EViews econometrics package. In particular, I concentrated on an Add-in that makes it easy to get from Quandl into an EViews workfile.The EViews team has just announced the availability of two new Ad...

## Exercices de probabilités, et rappels de statistique

September 3, 2014
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Vendredi, je commencerais les rappels de probabilités et statistiques. Le plan de cours est maintenant en ligne. J’ai ajouté quelques exercices de calcul de probabilités, histoire de s’entraîner. Un petit quizz sera organisé dans dix j...

September 3, 2014
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You just sent a long R job running. How to know when it’s done? Have it notify you by beeping, sending you a text, or sending you a notification via pushbullet. beepr You can use Rasmus Bååth’s beepr package to have your computer play a sound. Install it from CRAN with Then, at the bottom […]

## I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence

September 3, 2014
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It’s funny. I’m the statistician, but I’m more skeptical about statistics, compared to these renowned scientists. The quotes Here’s one: “You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.” Ahhhh, but we do have a choice! First, the background. We have two quotes from this paper by E. […] The post I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of…

September 3, 2014
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This chart published in Harvard Magazine has won my heart. It is well executed in many ways. The chart illustrates a study of time spent by assistant and associate professors. It focuses specifically on time spent working versus time spent...

## Background on my new 538 article on restaurant health grades

September 3, 2014
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Some behind-the-scenes comments on my recent article on New York's restaurant inspection grades; it appeared on FiveThirtyEight this Tuesday. *** The Nature of Ratings This article is about the ratings of things. I devoted a considerable amount of pages to this topic in Numbersense (link) - Chapter 1 is all about the US News ranking of schools. A few key points are: All rating schemes are completely subjective. There is…

## 3 in blog years: Sept 3 is 3rd anniversary of errorstatistics.com

September 3, 2014
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Where did you hear this?  “Join me, if you will, for a little deep-water drilling, as I cast about on my isle of Elba.” Remember this and this? And this philosophical treatise on “moving blog day”? Oy, did I really write all this stuff? I still see this as my rag-tag amateur blog. I never […]

## Resources for the FPP book

September 3, 2014
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The FPP resources page has recently been updated with several new additions including R code for all examples in the book. This was already available within each chapter, but the examples have been collected into one file per chapter to save copying and pasting the various code fragments. Slides from a course on Predictive Analytics from […]

## Getting Quandl Data Into EViews

September 2, 2014
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I've sung the praises of Quandl before - e.g., see here. What's not to like about millions of free time series data - especially when they're linked back to their original sources so that updating and accuracy is the least of your worries.If you can th...