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Evolution of First Names: Fashionable and Popular Names

2015-11-16

Last week I took a high level look at the trends in children’s names over the last century. Today I’ll dig a little deeper and examine the ebb and flow in popularity of some specific names. Read more »

Visualising James Bond movies

2015-11-16

Graph from Sparse Adjacency Matrix

2015-11-12 R

I spent a decent chunk of my morning trying to figure out how to construct a sparse adjacency matrix for use with graph.adjacency(). I’d have thought that this would be rather straight forward, but I tripped over a few subtle issues with the Matrix package. My biggest problem (which in retrospect seems rather trivial) was that elements in my adjacency matrix were occupied by the pipe symbol. Read more »

Evolution of First Names: Changes over the Last Century

2015-11-09

In light of recent developments, a bit of work that I did almost two years ago has become rather relevant. Read more »

LIBOR and Bond Yields

2015-11-06 R

I’ve just been looking at the historical relationship between the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and government bond yields. LIBOR data can be found at Quandl and comes in CSV format, so it’s pretty simple to digest. The bond data can be sourced from the US Department of the Treasury. It comes as XML and requires a little more work. > treasury.xml = xmlParse('data/treasury-yield.xml') > xml.field = function(name) { + xpathSApply(xmlRoot(treasury. Read more »

Guy Kawasaki on Personal Branding

2015-11-03

Kelsey Jones of Search Engine Journal interviews Guy Kawasaki of Canva. The key take-home message is that maintaining a personal brand is vital even if you are permanently employed. Specifically, it’s important to keep a visible record of who you have worked for and your personal successes. I'm living proof. I did one thing right for Apple thirty years ago. I've been coasting ever since. Just need to do one thing really right. Read more »

MonthOfJulia Day 38: Imaging

2015-10-30 Julia

MonthOfJulia Day 37: Fourier Techniques

2015-10-26 Julia

Data Scientists: Respect in the Workplace?

2015-10-26

Data Scientists are often among the best educated and most experienced on a team. Are you getting the respect you deserve? Read more »

Gitflow: A successful Git branching model

2015-10-20 Git

MonthOfJulia Day 36: Markdown

2015-10-19 Julia

Data Science Teams

2015-10-16

And even that insanely curious data scientist, if he or she insists on working alone, won’t be able to produce the most valuable insights. Those come from high-performing teams combining individuals who are individually curious and naturally creative, but also collaborative in their approach to the art and science of experimentation. A great data science team is like a jazz quartet, where individuals are always riffing off of one another, and each takes the music to a new and unexpected place. Read more »

WordPress: Underscores and SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

2015-10-16

The underscores are invisible in the code that I’m displaying on WordPress using the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved. After a bit of research I found that this was due to the line height being set too small. Read more »

Review: Beautiful Data

2015-10-15 R Python Book Review

MonthOfJulia Day 35: Mapping

2015-10-15 Julia

MonthOfJulia Day 34: Networking

2015-10-13 Julia

Julia on Windows behind a Firewall.

2015-10-13 Julia

I work on a Windows machine behind a corporate firewall during the day. It’s not optimal, but @rlnel kindly passed this information on to me, which has made the situation far more tolerable. Read more »

Installing LightTable and Juno on Ubuntu

2015-10-12 Julia

The recipe below works for Light Table v. 0.7.2 and Julia v. 0.4.0. It might work for other versions too, but these are the ones I can vouch for. Read more »