David Brooks has just written approvingly of Obama’s capitulation to Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy. He cites the most recent Gallup poll’s estimate that 67% of independents and 52% of Democrats support extending all the tax cuts. (In this poll, the average support over all political persuasions was 66%.) But you would think […]
I love Sweave for writing LaTeX documents with embedded R code, and R’s cacheSweave package helps tremendously in avoiding repetition of time-consuming computations. (Thank you, Roger Peng, for writing cacheSweave!) One catch that is evident from a careful perusal of the cacheSweave vignette but which I keep forgetting is that cacheSweave will not cache R […]
One of the things I do to my Sweave output is to make scientific notation more transparent. I have a special R function for this which I use in my Sweave documents: myFormat <- function(…) { tmp <- format(…) return(sub(“e(.*)”,”\\\\\\\\times 10^{\\1}”,tmp)) } Note in particular the ridiculous number of backslashes required in the call to […]
People often ask me about the relative merits of R versus other statistics & mathematical programming environments (Matlab, SPSS, and so forth). While I love R and use it almost every day, I always insist that it has a(n unnecessarily) steep learning curve and can bite you in ways that are hard to recognize. I […]