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Pivot Tables in Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc

One of the features I find useful in Excel is the ability to create “pivot” tables. Essentially pivot tables let you summarize big tables of data in different ways, using different variables to “pivot” your data around (hence the name, I guess). Pivot tables are most easily understood through an example, so here’s one done [...]

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Getting data into R

When you first open R, you’re greeted with a screen similar to the following: ?View Code RSPLUS1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 R version 2.10.0 (2009-10-26) Copyright (C) 2009 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing ISBN 3-900051-07-0   R is free software [...]

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The awesomeness that is WordPress and child themes

After a long long long time, I decided to get back into some actual website experimentation. For a while, I was really lazy with my site design and settled on using the Atahualpa theme. This was a great be-lazy theme, but I noticed that while browsing other sites, it often became too obvious which sites [...]

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R is like a giant calculator for grownups

One of the things that is interesting about R is how flexible it is. One of the fun things about it is how interactive it can be. While my examples so far have been a little bit more involved, it can be useful to spend some time just getting acquainted with how R performs basic [...]

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What some of the other people are doing….

I thought I’d take a break from my ego-centric rambling and share a little bit about what other people are doing…. Amy’s busy creating her own website, hosted at http://www.tnsms.org. No, it’s not about text messages from your Tamil Nadu mobile phone; it’s an abbreviation for “Tamil Nadu Socioeconomic Mobility Survey.” Just putting the site [...]

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A little spark for presenting your data

For some reason, I’ve been obsessing over the presentation of data. (Either it is that I’ve just read all of Edward Tufte‘s books, or I’m just being a nerd. But I guess that those two things aren’t exactly exclusive….) Considering my obsession, you could imagine how I felt when one of my students stood up [...]

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A Primer on Linking Disaster Risk Reduction with Development Efforts

I’m very happy to announce that the primer I wrote for the Advanced Centre for Enabling Disaster Risk Reduction is now available online. Here’s the abstract: When one surveys news reports today, mention of disasters seem to be commonplace. And, quite often, there is a lot of response to disasters. Aid agencies channel money or [...]

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13 years

On Saturday, Amy and I celebrated the 13-year anniversary of our “first date” by going to Kodaikanal for the day. Pretty fun, but nothing much to report, except for a few silly pictures:

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Font experiments, Part 2

My initial excitement about the Google Font Directory is a little bit diminished right now.

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Font experiments

Google just launched the Google Font Directory (beta, of course) and the Google Font API which provides web-designers with an easy way to extend the font options that tend to limit many websites. Using the service is pretty simple: go to the font directory, find the font you want to use, and follow the simple [...]

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