I was attending a course of Bayesian Statistics where this problem showed up: There is a number of individuals, say 12, who take a pass/fail test 15 times. For each individual we have recorded the number of passes, which can go from 0 to 15. Because of confidentiality issues, we are presented with rounded-to-the-closest-multiple-of-3 data […]
I’ve been having a conversation for a while with @kamal_hothi and @aschiff on maps, schools, census, making NZ data available, etc. This post documents some basic steps I used for creating a map on ethnic diversity in schools at the census-area-unit level. This “el quicko” version requires 3 ingredients: Census area units shape files (available […]
After writing a blog post about the paper “Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest” I decided to submit a formal comment to the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability in July 2013, which was published today. As far as I know, Heinemann et al. provided a rebuttal to my comments, which […]
I’m the first to acknowledge that most of my code could run faster. The truth of the matter is that, in essence, I write ‘quickies’: code that will run once or twice, so there is no incentive to spend days or hours in shaving seconds of a computation. Most analyses of research data fall in […]
The Swarm Lab presents a nice comparison of R and Python code for a simple (read ‘one could do it in Excel’) problem. The example works, but I was surprised by how wordy the R code was and decided to check if one could easily produce a shorter version. The beginning is pretty much the […]
Imagine that you are studying English as a second language; you learn the basic rules, some vocabulary and start writing sentences. After a little while, it is very likely that you’ll write grammatically correct sentences that no native speaker would use. You’d be following the formalisms but ignoring culture, idioms, slang and patterns of effective […]
I teach several courses every year and the most difficult to pull off is FORE224/STAT202: regression modeling. The academic promotion application form in my university includes a section on one’s ‘teaching philosophy’. I struggle with that part because I suspect I lack anything as grandiose as a philosophy when teaching: as most university lecturers I […]
How much does statistical software help and how much it interferes when teaching statistical concepts? Software used in the practice of statistics (say R, SAS, Stata, etc) brings to the party a mental model that it’s often alien to students, while being highly optimized for practitioners. It is possible to introduce a minimum of distraction […]
I wanted to develop a small experiment with a front end using the Processing language and the backend calculations in R; the reason why will be another post. This post explained the steps assuming that one already has R and Processing installed: Install the Rserve package. This has to be done from source (e.g. using […]
This week I’ve been feeling tired of excessive fanaticism (or zealotry) of open source software (OSS) and R in general. I do use a fair amount of OSS and pushed for the adoption of R in our courses; in fact, I do think OSS is a Good ThingTM. I do not like, however, constant yabbering […]
