Category Archives: (all categories)

It’s a choropleth party with R, and everyone’s invited

By Ananda | Published: May 16, 2010

Map party time. For some reason this happens every once in a while with me. A few years ago, I got to develop a website filled with choropleth maps galore. It was a pretty tedious process. Excel sheets. Photoshop. No good access to free Indian shapefiles. I was even thinking of making my own SVG [...]

Also posted in Geekiness, India, Useless Knowledge | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

You should run for office

By Ananda | Published: May 8, 2010

At least that’s what one of my former students told me at Tata-Dhan Academy’s third convocation, during which I got to dress up in a very white shirt and a long white dhoti.

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Quickly reshaping data from “wide” to “long” formats in R

By Ananda | Published: April 18, 2010

A lot of the times, students at the Academy enter data in a “wide” format (since it is a very natural way to enter data in a spreadsheet). Let’s say, for example, that they were collecting data for a household, and for each person, they were collecting information on three variables. Assume also that they [...]

Also posted in Geekiness, Useless Knowledge | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

The ODF Campaign

By Ananda | Published: February 13, 2010

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about poop in my “community”. Amy had given me a book to read called “The Big Necessity” and I found it really interesting and applicable to what the students at the Tata-Dhan Academy have been studying. I, in turn, lent the book to one of my colleagues, who [...]

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Democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, and bratty students

By Ananda | Published: January 19, 2010

I started the day today [note: as with "And when the numbers go against what you have always said....,” this was written around a week ago] with my dictionary. I was trying to remember more precise definitions of things like democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and meritocracy because our topic of discussion for the day was “deepening [...]

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And when the numbers go against what you have always said….

By Ananda | Published: January 19, 2010

Today [note: this was actually written about a week ago, but I just got around to finishing typing it], around 400 DHANites got together to talk about poverty and our motivation to work with the poor. Our “reference” materials were a chapter from a book titled Moving Out of Poverty (one of the authors of [...]

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The (unbutchered) retreat report

By Ananda | Published: January 13, 2010

I just came back from my first DHAN Foundation retreat (which I plan to write about later) and I also got two books filled with “retreat reports” from other DHANites. The retreat reports range from extremely dull to pretty fun to almost instructional. By design, they are meant to highlight the best and worst parts [...]

Also posted in (non) fiction, India, Stories | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Slug: Swingers, EPs, and more

By Ananda | Published: December 22, 2009

I don’t actually remember how I got to know about Slug, but I liked their, um, sluggish loud music. I think it had something to do with them using lots of bass guitars, and because “Swingers” was a 10″, and I really liked to collect 10″ records…. Here’s the “Swingers” 10″, a few 7″ singles, [...]

Also posted in Music, So sue me already, Vinyl-to-mp3 | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sampling with replacement in R

By Ananda | Published: November 30, 2009

In my last post about sampling (Simple sampling with R) we were doing simple sampling without replacement–that is, each item could only be selected once. However, there are times when you want to simulate sampling with replacement. For example, if you wanted to simulate sampling the results of rolling a dice 50 times, your outcomes [...]

Also posted in Geekiness, Useless Knowledge | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Google Page Creator is gone….

By Ananda | Published: November 23, 2009

And, they didn’t do such a great job of transferring the Google Page Creator content to Google Sites. So, I’ve decided to delete the content from Google Page Creator and transfer it here instead. This site has so much random content already; four more random articles shouldn’t make too much of a difference. Read on [...]

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