John Myles White

This morning I started thinking about using violations of classical economic theory to increase well-being.

Just when you worried that preference reversals weren’t real: Professional bookmakers rarely accept bets from individuals who directly control the outcome of the bet.

Introduction Link to heading I’ve just uploaded a new package to CRAN based on a stimulus generation algorithm that I use for my experiments on vision.

Initiates into the mysteries of the goddess Logical Rigor use a strange speech among themselves, and find it all but impossible to communicate their visions to the mass of ordinary, unilluminated mankind.

This is a follow up to my recent post introducing the use of JAGS in R through the rjags package.

I’m in the middle of a new project that involves analyzing the packages that are currently on CRAN.

In August 2008, I commented on the remarkable incompetence of Blockbuster’s CEO.

Introduction Link to heading As many people already know, I’ve recently uploaded a new R package called ProjectTemplate to GitHub and CRAN.

Get Everything Set Up Link to heading I’m going to assume that you have access to a machine that will run JAGS.

Neil Kodner wrote a great post this morning about yesterday’s Twifficiency scores outbreak.

Introduction Link to heading This week I decided to start unit testing my R code, so I taught myself the bare minimum about the RUnit and testthat packages to be able to use them.

Today, my friend Jim Keller and I are officially opening our new dating site, Junebug, to the public.

Lately I’ve been writing maximum likelihood estimation code by hand for some economic models that I’m working with.

I’ve changed the theme on this blog to the Hybrid theme.

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculatio…

The people who worry that the iPad will bring about a dystopian future for home computing keep forgetting something: for the rest of humanity, their ideal world of perfectly hackable machines is already a dystopian nightmare.

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My apologies for the long break between posts.

This post is a continuation of my series dealing with matrix operations for image processing.

[Update (2011-02-26): Thanks to Dan, I discovered that the first use of i in the code below was unclear.

Lately, I’ve been running a series of fMRI experiments on visual perception.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about implementing setter methods for objects in R.

With a little guidance from the indefatigable Hadley Wickham, I figured out today how to implement the setter methods that were missing from my example user class.

Until recently, I’ve never had any reason to learn how to define my own classes in R.

This term, I’ve been sitting in on Rene Carmona’s course on Modern Regression and Time Series Analysis.

Since people have asked, here is a GitHub page with all of the code used to generate my R function usage analyses: cran-function-usage-analysis.

This morning, I got a chance to read enough of the R Language Definition to finish my implementations of push and pop.

Yesterday, Hadley Wickham commented on my post on the frequency of calling various R functions that it would be helpful to have the number of packages that call a function in addition to the number of times that the function is called.

Having grown up with Perl, there are two functions that I desperately miss while programming in R: push and pop.

A few months ago I decided to apply word frequency analysis ideas to R code.

Andrew Gelman points out that there is now a website devoted entirely to Paul Meehl.

For a little more than a year now, I’ve been meaning to write a script to rename all of the files in my iTunes library so that they’re in proper English title case.

Like so many other programmers, I adore TextMate.

Introduction Link to heading As promised on Thursday, here’s my second pass at a statistical analysis of Canabalt scores.

At the office today, I got into a discussion with two of my fellow graduate students about the distribution of scores you can get while playing Canabalt.

As many people know, I adore the program Unison.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of my work over an SSH connection.

Here’s a very naive program I just wrote to update all of the R packages I have on my system after I update the core R binary.

Is it just me or does the Dock respond much more smoothly under 10.5.7 than under 10.5.6?

This is why I love XKCD, though surely the best part of this strip was the mouseover: “correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, ’look over there’.”

Being a drummer, a programmer and a fan of statistical analysis, this post on the (unnaturally) perfect timing of drum parts recorded to a click track was a real delight to me.

A recurrent source of irritation for me is the absence of a good default behavior in R for choosing the color scheme for bar plots.

On a regular basis, I have to process text in R.

Peter Norvig has a great post on his website about models used to claim that the primary system induces greater partisanship in our elected officials.

Every programming language – also every programmer – must trade off between writing code that is readable and producing code that executes the absolute minimum number of instructions to perform a task.

One of the misuses of statistical terminology that annoys me most is the use of the word “correlation” to describe any variable that increases as another variable increases.

Every time that I read a paper that discusses the frequencies of single letters in English, I feel like I should sit down and calculate them for myself from a sample of English text.

Updated: 2.17.09 Advocates of higher order programming languages, ranging from Lisp to Ruby, usually claim that programming in a higher order language is more efficient than programming in a language that is designed for easy translation into machine code,

For any Princeton graduate students who are interested, here’s the success rate for graduate students applying for school housing.

Yesterday the topic of academic citation counts came up, so I decided that I should write up some tools for exploring cite counts.