What I’m up to
This will be a short post, just to keep me in the habit. I found two new blogs I want you to know about: Normal Deviate and Econometrics by Simulation. The week after next PolMeth XXIX is in town and...
View ArticlePushing circles around
Occasionally, a need comes up for drawing a circle. Say you have a scattershot of points that follow a bivariate normal distribution, and you want to illustrate being within a given radius inside that...
View ArticleThe R library folder on a Mac
How do you update your R? I mean the whole thing, not just the base packages. R comes with a library folder where packages go -- both the base packages and the user-written ones you install over time....
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My MOOC habit
I can't seem to stay away from all this great online education, and the problem worsens as supply expands and prices fall. Back in 2008 I was paying NC State about $400 a pop for some CS courses that I...
View ArticleBenchmarks
I went googling for some examples of quadratic programming done in Mata, and stumbled across a fairly recent Statalist discussion. The original question is here and the official response, typically...
View ArticleSetting up my R library folder on a Mac
My understanding is that there are three kinds of R packages: base, recommended, and everything else. You can tell which is which by inspecting the output of installed.packages(). That is easiest done...
View ArticleI’m taking intro to biostats and epi (PH207x) from EdX
So far, it's been great fun. It's the first MOOC I saw where the software used is Stata, and I would not be surprised if this were a first among all commercial software packages. The topics covered and...
View ArticleTidying up your R packages
Do you have the same R packages installed in two places? Would you like to remove the duplicates? You might find the script below useful: rm(list=ls(all=TRUE)) # define function to return duplicate...
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An R-squared for logistic regression, packaged
This morning I checked Paul Allison's Statistical Horizons blog and found a post on measures for logistic regression. It introduced me to Tjur's by way of an example, which I repackaged below: //...
View ArticleA quick note on rJava
I recently had to set up a PC with similar kit as I have on my Mac. On this PC the OS is Windows 7 64-bit but the browser is IE8 32-bit. This causes jucheck.exe to install (and occasionally update)...
View ArticleKeeping knitr happy after upgrading to R 3.0.0
As noted here, after upgrading to R 3.0.0 you must run update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE) This is because a bunch of packages have to be to rebuilt under R 3.0.0 in order to keep working. So I did, but...
View ArticleStata 13 is coming on June 24
Yellow color scheme is out, sky-blue is in, plus expanded capabilities, as one might expect. Notable among them, xtologit, xtoprobit and long strings -- 2 billion character long, that is. One of these...
View ArticleI put up my first post on RPubs
Sure, it may be the 4chan of data analysis, but it's so nice to be able to do R Markdown right there in RStudio and just hit the Publish button. Of course, this convenience has downsides. I know it's...
View ArticleHow I backed up a bunch of old pictures to Amazon Glacier
This is from a home server that runs Fedora 14, to which I have ssh access from my MacBook Pro. 1. I git clone'd this. 2. Then, as super-user, I called wget...
View ArticleInvisible methods
R objects come with various methods that make them useful. I tend to stumble over these by googling something I want to do, and finding some code example on StackOverflow. But today I learned (from...
View ArticleFreeNAS works as advertised
I decided to replace the HDD with a SSD in my Mac for Christmas, but I only got as far as buying the thing and backing up the computer using Time Machine as explained here to a poor man's FreeNAS...
View ArticleMacbook Pro running hot, draining battery after upgrading to SSD?
Mine did. That was an unpleasant surprise. Googling for a solution brought up untold amounts of speculation and wasted time. What ended up working for me was resetting the System Management Controller...
View ArticleSome unresolved hiccups with R 3.1.0 on Mavericks, and a workaround
If you're going to download the Mac binaries for the latest R, you will see that they come in "Snow Leopard and higher" and "Mavericks and higher" flavors. If you run Mavericks, the latter is a natural...
View ArticleIntroducing syncR
A new and improved version of the syncPacks() function is now part of a GitHub package, which you can install through devtools::install_github('ghuiber/syncR'). If you're into that, you can help...
View ArticleHere’s to MOOC’s. They’re better than textbooks
The job of textbooks is to separate brilliance, which has zero marginal cost, from individual attention, which is labor-intensive. Everybody is better off when the few brilliant teachers write books...
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