Author Archives: Ananda

I’m not at all religious, but…

By Ananda | Published: June 26, 2011

… here is a goddess that I am happy to worship…

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On the trucks around town…

By Ananda | Published: June 15, 2011
We two, ours one

Anyone who has spent some time in India is sure to have noticed the slogans painted on the back of trucks, autos, and other vehicles advising “we two, ours one”. This is part of India’s “family planning” efforts–efforts which have had a pretty bumpy history that included a forced sterilization program. Originally, the slogans were [...]

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Stratified random sampling in R from a data frame

By Ananda | Published: May 20, 2011

After a little bit more work, there’s a new stratified random sampling function, this one letting you sample from a data frame, returning all the variables for each of your samples as a nice data frame that you can continue working on as usual. Get the function at http://news.mrdwab.com/stratified. Usage notes in the head of [...]

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Stratified Random Sampling in R–A Function in Progress

By Ananda | Published: May 15, 2011

IMPORTANT: This is here mostly to remind me of how I solved my problem. You should read Stratified random sampling in R from a data frame if you really want to use this function. I know that sampling is quite complex, and I will admit that I know very little about its complexities. Fortunately, software [...]

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Reshaping data in R revisited

By Ananda | Published: April 18, 2011

A year ago, I wrote a post about reshaping data from a wide format to a long format. I thought that considering how much time had passed, it would be good to revisit R’s in-built reshape functions. For these examples, I’ve copied the Stata examples from the UCLA Academic Technology Services’s “Reshape data wide to [...]

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The Cover Chain…

By Ananda | Published: April 13, 2011

I was flipping through some of the old books that I used to scribble in way back when, and I came across a page that had the following: This was a little idea that I had long before So, sue me already, back when I loved making mix-tapes for my friends. This mix-tape never materialized, [...]

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Regular expressions in R

By Ananda | Published: March 8, 2011

In my last post (Sounds interesting. Is that a regular expression?), I showed a few things I had figured out recently related to regular expressions. By now, you have also figured out that I like figuring things out in R, and application of regular expressions is one of these things.

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Sounds interesting. Is that a regular expression?

By Ananda | Published: March 7, 2011

I’ve been meaning to learn how to use regular expressions for quite some time now, but just never seemed to get around to doing so. The other night, I decided to take a stab at them though, and over the past few days, I’ve sort of managed to learn a few tricks. Some of these [...]

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Effective Communication?

By Ananda | Published: February 12, 2011

When people begin the study of communication, their attitudes vary anywhere from “I think this would be a very important class: it is important to understand the communication process if I want to improve the effectiveness of my communication,” to “What a waste of time. I’ve been communicating all my life. Do I really need [...]

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Spectrum: An exploration into open-source publishing

By Ananda | Published: October 3, 2010

Yesterday, at DHAN Foundation’s “Foundation Day” celebration, the students from PDM 11 of the Tata-Dhan Academy and others were able to have–after a really long break–a new issue of Spectrum: Colours of Development in their hands to look at (and hopefully read). Spectrum is the student newsletter of the Academy; students contribute articles, solicit articles [...]

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