While I’m no statistician, I’ve enjoyed dabbling in R and appreciate its simplicity and power. Take the LOESS function, for example. It’s built in to R. Excel needs a plug-in. Wow. Gotta love R. Used to love Excel, then I grew up (just a little 
Archive for the ‘Tools’ category
LOESS in Excel: Big deal?
June 30th, 2009New R script: Plot Nike+ runs
June 5th, 2009I’ve been playing around with R and Nike+ and thought I’d put the two together, so I wrote a little R script that pulls your public data from the Nike+ website and plot out the graphs. It’s a little rough around the edges (see below for a list of enhancements/fixes), but it generates plots. I like SlowGeek, but found their smoothing function a bit too “smooth” — it was shaving 1/2 mph from my run speeds. I wasn’t happy with that 
Read more to get the source code, below.
Sample: 
For an example of what it might look like, you can see my plots.
User Interface Patterns
May 26th, 2009
Since first reading the Gang-of-four’s book, I have thought patterns were a great idea. Now that I’m getting into design and data visualization more, I’m intrigued by the possibility of merging interface design with software patterns. Makes sense, don’t you think?
So, when I found UI-patterns.com, I thought “yes! here’s the merging of the two disciplines/approaches. Great. Now if I can just merge these patterns with Tufte-based principles and OVID-based development, I should be able to come up with a potent app in any environment.
Poly9 Globe: JavaScript-driven 3D globe app
May 26th, 2009Found a JavaScript-driven Flash-based globe application for simple GIS apps, called Poly9 Globe: the lightest, most compatible 3D globe on the web. They have full API documentation, too. Pretty slick, if your requirements are simple.
Data.gov open for business (and OECD seminar plug)
May 23rd, 2009
So, Data.gov is finally open and serving up links to data. I haven’t had a chance to dig in, yet, but since 3 of my favorite blogs (FlowingData, ProgrammableWeb, and DataVisualization) covered it, I thought I should at least mention it here.
P.S. Although not explicitly tied to data.gov, keep in mind the upcoming OECD Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge in DC July 15th and 16th. Amanda Cox from NYT is scheduled to attend. See accolades from Tufte himself. Woohoo.
