Blog Posts by Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

I have just started preparing a series of talks aimed at introducing the use of R to a rather broad audience consisting of physicists, chemists, statisticians, biologists and computer scientists (plus a few other disciplines thrown in for good measure). I want to use a single consistent set of data throughout the talks. Finding something that would resonate with such a disparate set of people was quite a challenge. After playing around with a couple of options, I settled on using data for age, height and mass. These are things that we can all identify with. The next challenge was to actually find a suitable data set, which was surprisingly difficult. Eventually I stumbled upon the data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), The data from the survey are available here. These data have been divided into a number of sets, each of which has been excellently curated and has a detailed codebook.

I was recently browsing through the variety of MetaTrader indicators for support and resistance levels. None of them ticked all of my boxes. Either they were not aesthetically pleasing (making a mess of my pristine charts) or they failed to produce what I consider to be reasonable levels. Embracing my pioneering spirit, I set out to fashion my own indicator, one which will ultimately tick all of my boxes.

Sample output from v1.2 of my support-resistance indicator is shown below for the weekly chart of GBPUSD.

A year or so ago I went to a talk which included a diagram showing the locations of Earth’s fleet of geosynchronous satellites. According to the speaker, the information in this diagram was already quite dated: the satellites and their locations had changed.