Prolific R developer Hadley Wickham provided an interesting perspective on data science and statistics in a recent Priceonomics article. There are definitely some academic statisticians who just don't understand why what I do is statistics, but basically I think they are all wrong. What I do is fundamentally statistics. The fact that data science exists as a field is a colossal failure of … [Read more...]
R is now 6th most popular language
R has moved from 9th (2014) to 6th place in the 2015 IEEE Spectrum top ten programming languages list. Pretty impressive given it's a statistical computing language. With Microsoft's recent backing, and its début in Spark, interest seems unlikely to have peaked. … [Read more...]
Definite proof that Jim Carrey causes autism
Fun example of "confusing" correlation with causation. … [Read more...]
IBM pledges commitment to Spark
IBM announced a major commitment to Spark last month, calling the open source project potentially the most important new open source project in a decade. The announcement covered a number of actions, including building Spark into the core of the company's analytics and commerce platforms using Spark to power Watson Health Cloud open sourcing their SystemML machine learning technology and … [Read more...]
R Consortium
The R Consortium has just been announced - with Microsoft as a founding Platinum member. Google, HP and Oracle are Silver members. According to their website, the consortium is a group of businesses organized under an open source governance and foundation model to provide support to the R community, the R Foundation and groups and individuals, using, maintaining and distributing R … [Read more...]