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Blog: May 2012 | Design and Analytics

Blog: May 2012

Weird Data Champion and Google Search

published by adam on Thu, 05/31/2012 - 15:37

Checking my web analytics, I noticed that Design & Analytics is now in the coveted #4 google hit position for "weird data sets."  That means I'm probably pretty close to getting Nike sponsorship and my face on a Wheaties box in the data olympics category.

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Recession Beard? Time Series in R (Part II)

published by adam on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 13:18

In Part I, we showed how to plot a time series of the change in American beards over time, using a dataset from Robert Hyndman's time series data library.  Today, we're going to look at whether the dramatic changes in American male beardfulness seem related to the economy.  Did Americans grow recession beards in response to the Panic of 1873?  Out of work, did they forgo their frequent trips to the barber (since Gillette didn't invent the personal safety razor until 1904 so they could do it themselves)?  Did they go on their job interviews with a face full of mutton chops and just never get called back (by telegram)?

What you'll learn

  • How to apply recession shading, according to the NBER's recession dates, to a time series---easily.
  • How to change the color of the recession shading
  • Whether 19th century gentlemen grew recession beards after losing their jobs in algo trading, you know, just taking some time off to study graphic design for a little bit.

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How many veterans are there? Memorial Day data

published by adam on Mon, 05/28/2012 - 18:33

The short answer is there are about 21 million American Veterans as of 2012. As a total, that's about 6.8% of the US population.

For comparison, that's about...

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American Beards Over Time: Time Series in R (Part I)

published by adam on Mon, 05/28/2012 - 17:45

If you use R for time series analysis, chances are you've used Robert J. Hyndman's excellent forecast tools.  I recently stumbled on his time series data library where I found just the data set I've been looking for to show some R time series plotting tricks:

http://robjhyndman.com/tsdldata/roberts/beards.dat

It's the percentage of American men with full beards reported annually.  Nothing serious here, but absurdly perfect for a set of posts to share a couple things that took me a while to learn when plotting in R.

Adidas Prophere Sale https://hemmalarinike.hatenablog.com/entry/2020/01/16/162403

What you'll learn

  • How to grab data from a plaintext source on the web, stripping header information
  • How to convert a list of data with a known start time and end time into an xts time series object
  • How to convert xts to a data.frame for plotting in ggplot2
  • Aesthetics for red data points with dotted line interpolation
  • How much American beardfulness there was in the late 19th century and early 20th.

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Notice: ARIMA Sector Report Revisions

published by adam on Sun, 05/13/2012 - 20:25

Just a minor note for the observant---I'm reprinting and reposting the ARIMA sector reports since March 12.  I was using ggplot2 as my graphics package (in R), which changed the way it formatted dates in a recent upgrade.  Since March, this meant the ARIMA forecast plots had the date format "2012-03-12" rather than simply listing full months by name, such as "March."  Past data was rerun, so everything else is identical, but the format of the date axis has been updated to the original, monthly format for purely aesthetic reasons.

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Some Press about European Crowdfunding

published by adam on Thu, 05/10/2012 - 16:46

Mentioned near the end, Reuters picked up our ECN launch last week: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/09/finance-crowdfunding-idUSL5E8G50RB20120509

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R/Finance 2012 is this weekend

published by adam on Tue, 05/08/2012 - 13:44

Gather 'round, R-users, forecasters, algo traders, and financial analysts.  The R in Finance conference is this Friday and Saturday, May 11 & 12, in Chicago.  All your favorite buzzwords, from algo trading, to data scientist, to big data, will be there---with talks given by the top experts in the R landscape.  Jeff Ryan's pre-conference session on processing full-market data looks particularly solid.

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The European Crowdfunding Network is live

published by adam on Sun, 05/06/2012 - 00:00

This is a project I'm pleased to have worked on with the Loft Finance team: http://europecrowdfunding.org/ The European Crowdfunding Network launched last week.  Its mission is to provide the groundwork for founding a European-wide Crowdfunding Association for funding startups and small businesses---using the power of P2P to get new ventures up and running.

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