Note: this blog is not ready for prime time. I have a bit to learn about blogs (CMS/wordpress), writing for a non-technical audience, and trying to present useful things to the world. By next year it should be up and going. Please email with any questions/comments regarding wordpress mistakes, data comments, code, comments, etc.
Purpose
The goal will be to get people interested in stats, show them tools and data, and try and make some research results available.
When I see posts like this (bleg at the bottom)
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/free-super-crunching-software/
it makes me want to do something to spread powerful statistical tools in an easy to use format. If only the theory were as easy to spread.
I think I’m going to start with a few posts about setting up a work environment; (as much for my own reference when I have to do it again). sql, R, emacs, bash, etc. As well as the blog side (setting up the blog, wordpress, sitemap, google webmaster tools, etc).
Organization
This blog has several main categories:
- tools (for data acquisition, storage, manipulation, analysis, archiving)
- data (sources and hosting)
- research (of others)
- projects (combination of tools and data; research from the site)
- asides (for my long winded digressions)
Getting Started
The first project will/might be to create a KML file for google earth. The idea is to take points as data, and convert them into a surface (a density). Maybe start with zip codes and population density or something.
Basically, I’d like to get a couple of basic projects together, then add them together later.
Interested in making some guest posts?
About the Title
Forest and trees refers to many things, as any decontscructionist english grad student will tell you. Of course, there’s the link between data analysis and “not being able to see the forest for the trees”. Kind of rings with something the late great John Tukey said. Then there are the statistical techniques named with “forest” (random forests of Leo Breiman) and “trees” (as in classification and regression trees of Breiman, Friedman, Stone and Oshen).
About the Artwork
All artwork was shamelessly taken from http://xkcd.org. I don’t know this Munroe, but I did once know a Munroe. He was an amatuer electrician and knocked out his front teeth with an electric drill (a 36v cordless dewalt, about chest high, then the drill bit froze on something and the battery pack swung around…). Anyway, this Monroe seems pretty cool, and he releases his work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you’re free to copy and share his comics (but not to sell them). More details.
