While getting extremely frustrated trying to import a simple dataset into R today I stumbled upon a post by Erehweb who sarcastically dissects the difficulty of importing numeric data into R and having it automagically converted to factors saying: Maybe when you do an uncommon operation like reading in a file, your numbers will be [...]

Maya Sen from the Social Science Statistics blog points out that some municipal governments in the USA are increasing transparency by releasing municipal data on topics such as crime, restaurant inspections, among others. Obviously, the movement of data out from behind the walls of our elected officials is something that I see to be very [...]

Nathan at the Flowing Data blog points out a very curious use of the pie chart. To be honest, I was distracted by the unnecessary use of the word “Back” before each of the candidates and didn’t notice the bigger mistake right away. The way I see it, if the Romney and Huckabee backers collude [...]

For those like myself who have recently switched to the Linux operating system, installing programs that are not in the Ubuntu repositories can be a challenge at times. I recently installed the statistical analysis program Stata on my computer running the latest stable version of Linux Mint Gloria, which is a fork of the popular [...]