Originally posted on God plays dice: Robert Sedgewick has the slides for a talk, Algorithms for the Masses on his web site. My favorite slide is the one titled “O-notation considered harmful” — Sedgewick observes that it’s more useful to say that the running time of an algortihm is ~aNc (and back this up with…

Originally posted on What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate: At any R Q&A site, you’ll frequently see an exchange like this one: Q: How can I use a loop to […insert task here…] ? A: Don’t. Use one of the apply functions. So, what are these wondrous apply functions and how do they work? I…

Originally posted on God plays dice: People who want to learn the very basics of R may find these videos made by some Berkeley grad students useful.

Originally posted on Causal Sports Fan: Here’s a fun fact. NHL first round winners were 45-54 in shootouts in the regular season. First round losers were 63-43.  Here are the match ups (higher regular season point total first, shootout record in parentheses, winner in bold): Rangers (4-5)  vs. Ottawa (6-4) Bruins (9-3) vs. Capitals (4-4)…

Originally posted on Drunks&Lampposts: A recent post on the Junkcharts blog looked at US weather dataand the importance of explaining scales (which in this case went up to 118). Ultimately, it turns out that 118 is the rank of the data compared to the previous 117 years of data (in ascending order, so that 118…

This planet obeys the law—stats on volcanic eruptions show pattern called Benford’s Law

The Age of Sail Visualized Cheers.

Originally posted on Causal Sports Fan: Earlier this week, I linked to an interesting auction-based proposal to help improve fairness in NFL overtime games. Right now, the coin flip gives the winning team a boost more often than not (the only exception is if the winning team mistakenly takes the ball but has a VERY…