therandomtexan
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smoothscatter( )
How come nobody told me about smoothscatter( )? This is neat! Tip from R-Bloggers. Read more
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Should I skip class today?
Skipping class is a dumb decision. But this calculator makes it an INFORMED dumb decision! Tip from Will Briggs, who has a bad attitude (one I share) about "distance learning." Update (21 August). Will Briggs follows up. He thinks skipping class is a REALLY dumb idea. I do too, but I tell my students that Read more
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“apply” yourself
Need to vectorize a function in R? Learn all the variations of the apply( ) function. Tip from R-Bloggers. Read more
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Public Welfare, for the poor or the civil servants?
Mark Tapscott ran some quick figures on the numbers of public welfare employees per 100,000 residents, using Census Bureau data. Here’s his Top 10 List.I ran a simple regression which suggests a zero intercept, and an average of 199.5 employees per 100,000 residents. The big outliers are New York, Texas, and Florida. Of course, the Read more
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Post turtle…
…as in "President Obama is just a post turtle. (photo by Eric Tank, on Flickr) Read more
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The professors who won’t retire
I work in what must be an exceptional department; my chair would be short of faculty if anyone retired right now. Not so other places. I love this comment In 1991 I decided to go for my PhD, and my advisor told me "In ten years there will be plenty of jobs, because all the Read more
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Hockey stick or pool cue?
Will Briggs reviews an article critical of Mann’s "hockey stick" model of global temperature, and proposes a simpler model. Ed Wegman gave a talk at JSM 2010 which pointed out how an uncorrected principal components analysis gives a biased outcome that looks very much like the hockey stick. Read more
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Nathan’s Rules for Charts
Nathan Yau is writing a series on the 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs. Here’s his first detailed exposition, Rule #1 Check the Data. Second one, Rule #2, Explain your encodings. Stay tuned for 6 5 more updates. Read more
The Random Texan 