Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

Visualizing election results

By

US flag in the shape of a map of the US

The New York Times published an article today on how it has mapped election results over the years. It illustrates the challenges of trying to present complex information succinctly to a lay, and possibly hostile, audience.

As they note, simply shading the states of the US based on the party that it voted for makes the country look decidedly Republican.

A timely reminder, if we needed it, of the challenges data scientists face in their goal of providing objective, unbiased information.

Flag image by DrRandomFactor.

Sharing R code using R-Fiddle

By

If you want to share a snippet of R code with others—e.g. for teaching or to get help on Stack Overflow—consider using R-Fiddle.

While gists are good for basic code sharing, R-Fiddle allows others to execute the code in place. You can even embed the code together with a working R console in blog posts (as an iframe).

R Notebooks

By

RStudio have announced R Notebooks. This adds an interactive execution model to R Markdown documents.

In R Markdown documents text and code can be mixed to create active documents that perform and update analyses as they are run.

However, R Markdown documents are executed in batch mode. This makes them more suitable for reporting than for teaching and investigation.

With the introduction of R Notebooks, code segments in the R Markdown document can be edited and executed in isolation—making the whole experience much more interactive.

R Notebooks can be saved as text (HTML) files allowing them to be shared via GitHub, for example. The HTML files can be viewed in a standard web browser as static documents. However, when the files are opened in RStudio, the R Notebook is automatically recreated from the HTML.

Support is also provided for languages other than R, including Python, C and SQL.

For more information, check out the development team’s YouTube video.