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Feb 16, 2016

Sleep with One Eye Open

I saw a job posting looking for programmers to make a chatbot. I've done this before, though it was almost 20 years ago. I created a chatbot in bash, mostly because my…

Feb 15, 2016

waterfall 1.0.0 released

Sometime, approximately forever ago, I put together a small package to produce waterfall charts in R. It provided two functions, one using base graphics and one using lattice graphics. I planned to…

Feb 13, 2016

Big Data in the Online Classroom

I am taking an online class in how to teach online classes. This is a bit meta and I've taught online since 2010, but that's okay. We have a group project in…

Feb 12, 2016

Zika For the Rest of Us

We keep hearing about Zika virus, and in pregnant women, can cause microcephalic births. That's pretty scary, but as a man who is not planning on having any children any time, I…

Feb 11, 2016

Pennsylvania's Flood Insurance Exchange

Pennsylvania has set up a new website, similar to the health care exchanges, that provides access to private flood insurance. Florida also has such a system and it is something we can…

Feb 10, 2016

Code Coverage Counterexamples

Code coverage is not what it's cracked up to be. As an experiment, I started using Coveralls on two of my R projects, cmna and phonics . Both projects had unit testing…

Feb 9, 2016

Solar-Powered Trains

Chase asked me why the MARC Train is not solar powered. I explained one line, the Penn Line, is electric and it gets power from many different sources, but the other two…

Feb 8, 2016

Historical Social Discount Rates

Last week, with a day to spare, I got my submission into the 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). My submission is something of a side project that grew out of my dissertation.…

Feb 4, 2016

Jeg Er En Frø!

After completing the Danish course last May, I was kind of at a loss for how to proceed. Duolingo rewards daily usage, so I did the completely rational thing and went all…

Feb 2, 2016

EPA Course for Local Governments on Climate Change

The Environmental Protection Agency has put together a only training course on adapting to climate change: ::embed{href="http://www.epa.gov/communityhealth/local-government-climate-adaptation-training"} This is actually really cool. The course is set up like a standard webinar, but…