Taking a break from my normal exposition on stats, New York or pizza I’d like to espouse the wonders of baking soda and vinegar! My sink was clogged, not with anything specific, but just years worth of gunk. So after scraping out what I could with my hands and a wire hanger–and wanting to avoid… Continue reading
A new study, reported in the New York Times, tracked population movements in post-earthquake Haiti using cell phone data. The article grabbed my attention because one of the authors, Richard Garfield (whom I have done numerous projects with and who has his own Wikipedia entry!), had told me about this very study just a few… Continue reading
Fig. 1: This graph shows received and sent text messages by month. Notice the spike in July 2010. A few weeks ago my iPhone for some reason erased ALL of my previous text messages (SMS and MMS) and it was as if I was starting with a new phone. After doing some digging I discovered… Continue reading
Daily Intel caught wind of a California Lawyer interview with US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia where he proclaims New York pizza “is infinitely better than Washington pizza, and infinitely better than Chicago pizza.” I may be biased to New York pizza as well, but that is a debate I’ll save for another day. It gets really… Continue reading
Today is World Statistics Day as declared by the United Nations. There are events all over the world including a mourning for the Canadian census. The official US event (pdf) is in Washington, DC but a bunch of New Yorkers are celebrating at the bit.ly hack.a.bit. Drew Conway has some ideas how to celebrate. Ban Ki-Moon’s… Continue reading
Tonight I will be giving a talk with Harlan Harris at the Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Meetup in New York. It is going to be an introduction to Multilevel Models with examples in R and from previous projects I have worked. Here’s the details for the talk. Related Posts The virtual 2021 R Government &… Continue reading
Last Wednesday I made a trip to Di Fara in Midwood, Brooklyn. Since that place is well covered and lauded I won’t talk about the pizza, as amazing as it is. I gave Dom a copy of my thesis (pdf) on NYC pizza and he loved that his place was one of the few pizzerias mentioned by… Continue reading
Less than a month ago, Drew Conway suggested that our R user group present an analysis of the WikiLeaks data. In that short time he, Mike Dewar, John Myles White and Harlan Harris have put together a beautiful visualization of attacks in Afghanistan. The static image you see here has since been animated which is… Continue reading
Both the Journal and the Times reported on a studyabout New York City traffic which someone has called the “most statistically ambitious ever undertaken by a U.S. city.” That just sounds awesome to me, both as a statistican and a pedestrian. According to the report, New York is one of the safest cities in America to… Continue reading
The New York Times has a couple pieces today about ice cream. The one that really caught my attention (thanks to Pat Kiernan) is on the skyrocketing cost for a scoop of ice cream. I had somehow gotten used to paying three, four or more dollars at places like Cones, L’Arte del Gelato or the Chinatown Ice… Continue reading
