Hadley Wickham’s popular R developer course is coming to Melbourne on 12-13 December 2016. Bookings can be made via Eventbrite. Hadley, of course, is the developer of the wonderful tidyverse set of R packages including ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, readr, purrr, tibble, and many more. He is the author of several books including the new “R for […]
Five years ago I wrote a post titled, "Beware of Econometricians Bearing Spreadsheets". The take-away message from that post was simple: there's considerable, well-documented, evidence that spreadsheets are very, very, dangerous when it comes to s...
Here's some suggested reading for the coming month:Backhouse, R. and B. Cherrier, 2016. 'It's computerization, stupid!' The spread of computers and the changing roles of theoretical and applied economics.Castle, J. L., M. P. Clements, and D. F. H...
I received an email from Michael Belongia, who said:"I wrote earlier in response to your post about Almon lags but forgot to include an anecdote that may be of interest to your follow-up.In the late 1960s, the "St. Louis Equation" became a standa...
Introduction In the previous post I gave a quick introduction to some important concepts in functional programming, such as HOFs, closures, currying and partial application, and hopefully gave some insight into why these concepts might be useful in the context of scientific computing. Another concept that is very important in modern functional programming is that … Continue reading First steps with monads in Scala
Recently, I received an email from Florian Heiss, Professor and Chair of Statistics and Econometrics at the Henrich Heine University of Dusseldorf.He wrote:"I'd like to introduce you to a new book I just published that might be of interest to you: Usin...
The Gretl econometrics package is a great resource that I've blogged about from time to time. It's free to all users, but of a very high quality. Recently, I heard from Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti - one of the principals of Gretl. He wrote:"In ...
RStudio has been a life-changer for the way I work, and for how I teach data analysis. I still have a couple of minor frustrations with it, but they are slowly disappearing as RStudio adds features. I use dual monitors and I like to code on one monitor and have the console and plots on […]
The github page for the forecast package currently shows the following information Note the downloads figure: 264K/month. I know the package is popular, but that seems crazy. Also, the downloads figure on github only counts the downloads from the RStudio mirror, and ignores downloads from the other 125 mirrors around the world. Here are the […]
I’ve been having discussions with colleagues and university administration about the best way for universities to manage home-grown software. The traditional business model for software is that we build software and sell it to everyone willing to pay. Very often, that leads to a software company spin-off that has little or nothing to do with the university that nurtured the […]
