Author Archives: brendano

R is notoriously hard to learn, but there was just an effort [1] [2] to populate the programming question-and-answer website StackOverflow with content for the R language. Amusingly, one of the most useful intro questions is: How to search for “R” materials? … Continue reading →

…is a tongue-in-cheek phrase from Trevor Hastie’s very fun to read useR-2009 presentation, from the merry trio of Hastie, Friedman, and Tibshirani, who brought us, among other things, the excellent Elements of Statistical Learning textbook.  It’s a joy to read sophisticated … Continue reading →

Here’s a little interactive explorer for the beta probability distribution, a conjugate prior for the Bernoulli under Bayesian inference… Ack, too much jargon. Simply press the right arrow every time you see the sun rise, the up arrow when it … Continue reading →

Michael Jackson just died while Iran is in turmoil. I am reminded of a passage in Marjane Satrapi’s wonderful graphic novel Persepolis, a memoir of growing up in revolutionary Iran in the 80′s. (Read the book to see how it … Continue reading →

It is rather surprising that systematic studies of human abilities were not undertaken until the second half of the last century… An accurate method was available for measuring the circumference of the earth 2,000 years before the first systematic measures … Continue reading →

BBC News – June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square Massacre Also worth reading: Nicholas Kristof’s riveting firsthand account.

Playing around with stream.twitter.com/spritzer, ggplot2 and maps / mapdata: I think I like the top better, without the map lines, like those night satellite photos: pointwise ghosts of high-end human economic development. This data is a fairly extreme sample of … Continue reading →

Will Fitzgerald just wrote about an excellent article by Steven Strogatz on Zipf’s Law for the populations of cities. If you look at the biggest city, then the next biggest city, etc., there tends to be an exponential fall-off in … Continue reading →

I’m doing word and bigram counts on a corpus of tweets. I want to store and rapidly retrieve them later for language model purposes. So there’s a big table of counts that get incremented many times. The easiest way to … Continue reading →