programming
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Oh, and in my spare time, I invented TeX
Writing in Quanta, Susan D’Agostino has a fascinating interview with the computing-est of all computer scientists, Donald Knuth. Who continues his Everest-like trek up his monumental Art of Computer Programming. This (intrinsically) never-to-be-completed opus to the mathematics and techniques of algorithms was, for many of us, the first introduction to formal analysis of algorithms and Read more
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KWIC, make me some hash!
IEEE Spectrum has a fascinating bio sketch of Hans Peter Luhn, inventor of the hashing and KWIC indexing algorithms. This is Luhn’s legacy: He helped show that computers and computation weren’t just the province of mathematics, statistics, and logic but also of language, linguistics, and literature. In his day, this was a revolutionary way to Read more
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R Tutorial: the non-linear equation solver
Need a numerical solution to simultaneous non-linear equations? The nleqslv package is just what you’re looking for! The coding required is minimal; just define the equations you want solved in a function, set some initial values, and let ‘er rip. Here’s an example that uses the method of moments to estimate the parameters of a Read more
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Bump charts get renamed as SLOPEGRAPHS
Charlie Park has a nice post describing Tufte’s slopegraphs (old chart, new name). Kaiser Fung likes these a lot; he’s been calling them Bump charts. I introduce these to my undergrads when we discuss the paired t test. Tip from kottke.org. Update (16 July). James Kierstead publishes an R implementation. Read more
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Learn MATLAB, cheap
Cleve Moler, Chairman and Chief Scientist at the MathWorks, has published an online MATLAB texbook, Numerical Computing with MATLAB. You can download the chapters as individual PDFs, for free. Tip from the MathWorks, via email. (I knew there was a reason to stay on that mailing list!) Read more
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Better than pretty
Pretty R is a syntax formatter for R, it generates highlighted and properly indented R code suitable for including in an HTML document. Better yet, all the R keywords are linked back to an online reference manual at inside-r.org! Check it out. # multiple comparison with aov s <- read.table(“dogFoodSales.txt”,header=T) # fit the Read more
The Random Texan 