Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

I read an interesting article in the 10 June 2015 edition of The Wall Street Journal. The graphic below concisely illustrates the focused strategy being adopted by Disney: a steady decline in the number of movies released per year accompanied by a steady ascent in operating margin.

RStudio does not like Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) paths. This can be a problem if, for example, you install it under Citrix. The solution is to create a suitable environment file.

I recently finished some work on a Shiny application which incorporated a Random Forest model. The model was stored in a .rda file and loaded by server.R during initialisation. This worked fine when tested locally but when I tried to deploy the application on shinyapps.io I ran into a problem: evidently you can only upload server.R and ui.R files. Nothing else.

With only a few days to go until race day, most Comrades Marathon athletes will focusing on resting, getting enough sleep, hydrating, eating and giving a wide berth to anybody who looks even remotely ill.

They will probably also be thinking a lot about Sunday’s race. What will the weather be like? Will it be cold at the start? (Unlikely since it’s been so warm in Durban.) How will they feel on the day? Will they manage to find their seconds along the route?

Faceted plots in ggplot2 are phenomenal. They give you a simple way to break down an array of plots according to the values of one or more categorical variables. But what if you want to stack plots of different variables? Not quite so simple. But certainly possible. I gathered together this solution from a variety of sources on Stack Overflow, notably this one and this other one. A similar issue for vertical alignment is addressed here.

An interesting paper (Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans, Nature, 431, 562–566, 2004) by Rohde, Olson and Chang concludes with the words:

With the circlize package, putting together a Chord Diagram is simple.

Predicting Comrades Marathon finishing times is challenging and people have tried a few different approaches. Lindsey Parry, for example, suggests that you use two and a half times your recent marathon time. Sports Digest provides a calculator which predicts finishing time using recent times over three distances. I understand that this calculator is based on the work of Norrie Williamson.

Apparently 14 runners have been disqualified for failing to complete the full distance at the 2012 and 2013 Comrades Marathons.

I’m not convinced.

A contribution which I wrote for Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth’s Polar Regions.

Following up on my previous post about generating Sankey plots with the riverplot package. It’s also possible to generate plots which have constant coloured edges.

A contribution which Claire and I wrote for Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth’s Polar Regions.

I’ve updated my Comrades Marathon pacing chart to include both the Up and Down runs. You can grab it here. The data for this year’s race are not yet finalised (I think we will be running 87 km), but you can make changes when it’s all confirmed.

The cost of fuel in South Africa (and I imagine pretty much everywhere else) is a contentious topic. It varies from month to month and, although it is clearly related to the price of crude oil and the exchange rate, various other forces play an influential role.

A contribution which I wrote for Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth’s Polar Regions. As a side note, I am normally quite pedantic about “Earth” and “Sun” being capitalised but the editor of the Encyclopaedia evidently had different views on this point.

A contribution which Claire and I wrote for Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth’s Polar Regions.

A contribution which I wrote for Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth’s Polar Regions.

I have just been trying to import some data into R. The data were exported from a SQL Server client in tab-separated value (TSV) format. However, reading the data into R the “usual” way produced unexpected results: