UseR! 2011 slides are now available

I have just realized that UseR! 2011 presentation slides are now available from the conference web site.

Unfortunately, no big surprise this year. Or maybe this is good news as it means that I have all the important stuff in my RSS Reader. And by the way, this blog is now listed on www.r-bloggers.com.

To be fair there was a couple of interesting talks (reaching my attention before the slides were published), namely

Paul Marrel: Vector Image Processing
Paul is converting static PDF image into dynamic SVG graphics. This is not so much about R but it is really cool.

Markus Gesmann: Using the Google Visualisation API with R
Easy way how to put dynamic images on your web page. Particularly useful, if you work with GPS tracking data. Verified :-)

Susan Ranney: It's a Boy! An Analysis of Tens of Millions of Birth Records Using R
RevoScaleR functionality demonstrated on 3.1GB dataset of birth records.

Ulrike Grömping: Design of Experiments in R
This is a bit personal. I have very little (read "no") experience with designing experiments (DoE). Back in 2008 I met my wife's supervisor that was an author of an old commercial DoE software. We both realized that R missed a lot of DoE methods. The problem was my lack of theoretical knowledge in this area and his style of work. I gave up but I am happy that they finally finished the job without me - the book was published and the package is available on CRAN. Looking into DoE CRAN Task View - we were not alone.

Prague Half Marathon Ranking: 2% or 25% missing?

I am a regular participant of Prague International Half Marathon. In a mass event like this the horde of runners needs a long time to reach the starting line. To make the times mutually comparable the “start time” is measured and afterwards subtracted from the “finish time”. Also the crowd is organized to corridors in such a way that faster runners are ahead of the slower ones.

Sometimes everything goes wrong and that was the case of the year 2010. Imagine yourself to train for months then make your best – just to discover that your time of start was not recorded. Organizers apologized but claimed that only less than 2% of the participants were affected. Really?

How to display R code on a web page

Starting to write a blog I need a way how to publish my R codes. One possibility would be to just add some formatting with Pretty R. Nice, but I miss a repository with all codes ever submitted and possibility to make corrections.

The final solution was to create an account on Github and submitting codes via Gist. The only problem was you cannot see the code in the Google Reader. I believe I can live with it.

Getting Genetics Done: Syntax Highlighting R Code, Revisited

Email Netiquette

A short piece of web-scrapping I sent as a reminder to my colleague.