Posts

Docker and R – Talk for the Greater Cleveland R Group

I was able to give a talk recently to the Greater Cleveland R Group about using Docker and R together. Docker is a virtualization platform that uses OS-level virtualization to provide containers. It’s pretty neat, so I wanted to share the talk here. Big thanks to Tim Hoolihan for both organizing the R User Group in Cleveland, and also filming and nicely editing my video when part of the presentation unexpectedly did not work.

September 4, 2017 Read

Intro to Shiny – Talk for the Greater Cleveland R Group

I was able to give a talk recently to the Greater Cleveland R Group about Shiny, the R package that lets you build web apps for data visualization and analysis using R. It’s a pretty neat package, and I wanted to share my slides, code, and presentation here. My thanks to Gaurav Narain Saxena for recording the presentation for me! Code Slides

June 27, 2015 Read

Write your own! On having better habits as an R programmer

I contribute responses to Stack Overflow pretty frequently. I like answering well-written questions and enjoy that it keeps my skills sharp. However, one area of annoyance for me on Stack Overflow is that many answers start with something like: “You can do this using the <package name> package” - even when the task at hand can be handled in base R. For many posters, that’s probably not a big deal, but I find myself getting those answers occasionally on my questions, even when I explicitly ask for base R solutions.

June 9, 2015 Read

This One Chart Perfectly Sums Up Why Most Posts That Start This Way Are Total Lies!!!

How many times have you heard this line before? “This one graph perfectly sums up the current plight of Millenials!” Or maybe this version? “This one chart shows everything about global warming in a nutshell!” It’s one of the more common clickbait articles, but as a data science professional and Edward Tufte fan, I just can’t take it anymore. I decided I’d make my own graph explaining this. In a nutshell, here’s how it works:

January 21, 2015 Read

Optical Mark Recognition – Example for the Udai OMR Tool

On Google+, a user recently hit up one of my older posts about using an open-source, Java-based optical mark recognition (OMR) tool that I found and played with awhile back. I promised that I would dig and see if I had any working templates, etc, left, and I do! I’ve linked a public Google Drive folder where I’ve put this stuff. Basically, what you get here are: my notes from when I was using this before a batch script I wrote to connect it all the asc, config, and fields files for the template_trial the original Word documents and PNG files used to create the template (/projects/trial) six PNG files created from this template you can use to test the script (/trial_pg1) I just ran the script again and it seemed to work fine on my system (Windows 7, 64-bit), and this was initially developed on an x86 Windows XP box.

November 26, 2012 Read

Using match() to recode in R

Nice and simple write-up on how to do this; reposting because I happen to be doing it tonight!

October 25, 2012 Read

What's YOUR PIN?

This article combines a number of my loves: data visualization, information security, and large-scale data analysis. Enjoy!

September 28, 2012 Read

What You Do vs. Why You Do It

I really enjoyed this TED talk by Simon Sinek, and wanted to share it. It’s a great discussion about leadership, and it has this gem of a quote in it: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe.” - Simon Sinek As he was going on, I was struck by how similar his ideas sounded to some concepts in Aristotelian ethics - about character, virtue, and the value of repeated actions becoming habits.

August 21, 2012 Read

We stopped dreaming – Neil deGrasse Tyson

This is a fantastic video. It is worth the 5 minutes to watch, simply to understand why the space program was important.

March 13, 2012 Read

Make Your Own Ending: Reflections on the role of Deus Ex in the gaming world

I consider myself to be an avid PC gamer. Not in the sense of having played some PC games, but in the sense of being a hobbyist - following gaming news, checking in on games in development, reading gaming magazines regularly, and so on. Accordingly, I spend a lot of time thinking about how PC gaming (and video gaming as a whole) has developed over the past 20 years, and where it is heading now.

August 28, 2011 Read

Optical Mark Recognition – On The Cheap

At my job about a year ago, my coordinator asked me to look into using some kind of optical mark recognition (OMR) program to read surveys that we were administering, to cut down on the burden of data entry. There are a lot of commercial programs for OMR, but we wanted to avoid spending any money, so I did a little research and stumbled across this gem, the Udai OMR tool.

July 15, 2011 Read

R Tip – Directly Access the REDCap API from R

Note: As will be obvious, this example comes from a Windows XP platform. I stumbled across this earlier and thought it would be a useful statistics tip to share with the world. Those of you working in health care research may already know about REDCap, which stands for Research Electronic Data Capture. It’s a project out of Vanderbilt University that’s designed to improve research by allowing easy creation of “databases”. I say that loosely because each project is basically a single table, with little in the way of relational structures.

July 14, 2011 Read