2013
2013

Continuing the annual tradition of Pi Cakes from Chrissie Cook we have gotten another Pi Cake!  This year we let Drew Conway’s wife pick the flavors and she went with vanilla and red velvet (the blue color is to cause some cognitive dissonance).  Looking forward to enjoying this tonight after some pizza.

Previous cakes in the gallery after the break.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

plot of chunk plot-play-by-down

Continuing with the newly available football data (new link) and inspired by a question from Drew Conway I decided to look at play selection based on down by the Giants for the past 10 years.

Visually, we see that until 2011 the Giants preferred to run on first and second down.  Third down is usually a do-or-die down so passes will dominate on third-and-long.  The grey vertical lines mark Super Bowls XLII and XLVI.

Code for the graph after the break.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Wes McKinney and I are hosting our first ever Open Statistical Programming meetup tomorrow night after taking over for Drew Conway.  Please attend, have some pizza, enjoy the talk then come out for some beer.

This meetup is about EDA, Visualization and Collaboration on the Web and will be presented by Carlos Scheidegger from AT&T Labs.

This month’s pizza will be from Pizza Mercato in the Village.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Pi Day Celebrants

As mentioned earlier, yesterday was Pi Day so a bunch of statisticians and other such nerds celebrated at the new(ish) Artichoke Basille near the High Line.  We had three pies:  the signature Artichoke, the Margherita and the Anchovy, which was delicious but only some of us ate.  And of course we had our custom cake from Chrissie Cook.

The photos were taken by John.

Pi Cake 2011
NYC Data Mafia
NYC Data Mafia

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Pi CakeHappy Pi Day everybody!  I’ll be out celebrating with the rest of the NYC Data Mafia eating pizza and devouring the above Pi Cake, custom baked by Chrissie Cook.

Today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday so there are plenty of reasons to have fun.

The cake below was my first ever Pi Cake in what is sure to become an annual tradition.

Pi Cake 2009

Update: Drew Conway does far more justice to our fair, irrational, transcendental number.

Update 2:  Engadget posted this awesome video of “What Pi Sounds Like.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Data Mafia Shirt

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

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 a really nice touch.

Within a few hours of them posting their initial results the work spread across the internet, even getting written up in Wired’s Danger Room.  Today, they got picked up by the New York Times where you can see the animation.

The bulk of the work was, of course, done in R.  I remember talking with them about how they were going to scrape the data from the WikiLeaks documents, but I am not certain how they did it in the end.  As is natural for these guys they made their code available on GitHubso you can recreate their results, after you’ve downloaded the data yourself from WikiLeaks.

Briefly looking at their code I can see they used Hadley Wickham’s ggplot and plyr packages (which are almost standard for most R users) as well as R’s mapping packages.  If you want to learn more about how they did this fantastic job come to the next R Meetup where they will present their findings.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Thanks to Drew Conway for posting this video of me dicussing my thesis (pdf) on NYC pizza.  It was part of the New York R User Meetup on Applications of R.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Drew Conway has a piece on his Zero Intelligence Agents blog about how well informed Tea Party protesters are about tax policy.  His analysis is pretty technical and he even offers up the R code he used to analyze the data and build the graphs which were made with a package called ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham at Rice University.

More after the break. Continue reading

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.