R is Ready for Business™

A new 5 page brochure from Revolution Analytics. Not that slick and some marketing under-kill (which frankly is a surprise)- but I guess Revolution Analytics does not have a full time graphics designer to help with it’s collateral.

Take a look if you are curious how and why R is getting more and more ready for business.

Test drive a Chrome notebook.

The United States
Image via Wikipedia

Wanna test out the new Chrome OS.

Go to https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic/

and fill the form

Chrome

Test drive a Chrome notebook.

We have a limited number of Chrome notebooks to distribute, and we need to ensure that they find good homes. That’s where you come in. Everything is still very much a work in progress, and it’s users, like you, that often give us our best ideas about what feels clunky or what’s missing. So if you live in the United States, are at least 18 years old, and would like to be considered for our small Pilot program, please fill this out. We’ll review the requests that come in and contact you if you’ve been selected.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic/

 

How to Analyze Wikileaks Data – R SPARQL

Logo for R
Image via Wikipedia

Drew Conway- one of the very very few Project R voices I used to respect until recently. declared on his blog http://www.drewconway.com/zia/

Why I Will Not Analyze The New WikiLeaks Data

and followed it up with how HE analyzed the post announcing the non-analysis.

“If you have not visited the site in a week or so you will have missed my previous post on analyzing WikiLeaks data, which from the traffic and 35 Comments and 255 Reactions was at least somewhat controversial. Given this rare spotlight I thought it would be fun to use the infochimps API to map out the geo-location of everyone that visited the blog post over the last few days. Unfortunately, after nearly two years with the same web hosting service, only today did I realize that I was not capturing daily log files for my domain”

Anyways – non American users of R Project can analyze the Wikileaks data using the R SPARQL package I would advise American friends not to use this approach or attempt to analyze any data because technically the data is still classified and it’s possession is illegal (which is the reason Federal employees and organizations receiving federal funds have advised not to use this or any WikiLeaks dataset)

https://code.google.com/p/r-sparql/

Overview

R is a programming language designed for statistics.

R Sparql allows you to run SPARQL Queries inside R and store it as a R data frame.

The main objective is to allow the integration of Ontologies with Statistics.

It requires Java and rJava installed.

Example (in R console):

> library(sparql)> data <- query("SPARQL query>","RDF file or remote SPARQL Endpoint")

and the data in a remote SPARQL  http://www.ckan.net/package/cablegate

SPARQL is an easy language to pick  up, but dammit I am not supposed to blog on my vacations.

http://code.google.com/p/r-sparql/wiki/GettingStarted

Getting Started

1. Installation

1.1 Make sure Java is installed and is the default JVM:

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

1.2 Configure R to use the correct version of Java

$ sudo R CMD javareconf

1.3 Install the rJava library

$ R> install.packages("rJava")> q()

1.4 Download and install the sparql library

Download: http://code.google.com/p/r-sparql/downloads/list

$ R CMD INSTALL sparql-0.1-X.tar.gz

2. Executing a SPARQL query

2.1 Start R

#Load the librarylibrary(sparql)#Run the queryresult <- query("SELECT ... ", "http://...")#Print the resultprint(result)

3. Examples

3.1 The Query can be a string or a local file:

query("SELECT ?date ?number ?season WHERE {  ... }", "local-file.rdf")
query("my-query.rq", "local-file.rdf")

The package will detect if my-query.rq exists and will load it from the file.

3.3 The uri can be a file or an url (for remote queries):

query("SELECT ... ","local-file.db")
query("SELECT ... ","http://dbpedia.org/sparql")

3.4 Get some examples here: http://code.google.com/p/r-sparql/downloads/list

SPARQL Tutorial-

http://openjena.org/ARQ/Tutorial/index.html

Also read-

http://webr3.org/blog/linked-data/virtuoso-6-sparqlgeo-and-linked-data/

and from the favorite blog of Project R- Also known as NY Times

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/sorting-through-the-government-data-explosion/?twt=nytimesbits

In May 2009, the Obama administration started putting raw 
government data on the Web. 
It started with 47 data sets. Today, there are more than
 270,000 government data sets, spanning every imaginable 
category from public health to foreign aid.

Collateral

10 9 09 Bearman Cartoon Obama Nobel Peace Prize
Image by Bearman2007 via Flickr

It has always surprised me- how my American friends who passionately support the First Amendment kind of always oppose the Second Amendment and vice versa. Being a non American- I would always take the Fifth.

An earlier Wikileak video of killing two Reuters Employees-and I am not sure who is right- American govt for restricting access to federal employees or Chinese govt for restricting access to Nobel peace  prize.

or all the Govts of the world for all the cables they write. and all the journalists for all the stories they tell.

Merry Christmas anyways.

from Wikiquotes of another Indian.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they are palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding between the two communities in South Africa can be removed.

In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the native. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?

  • Comments on a court case in The Indian Opinion (25 March 1905)
  • Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.
    • Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947) , as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi : The Last Phase (1958) by Pyarelal, p. 326. The last sentence of this statement has sometimes been quoted as if it was being made as an affirmation of extreme hostility to the British, rather than as part of an affirmation of the strength of non-violence, and the ultimate weakness of those who needlessly resort to violence if it is within their power.
  • One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects
  • The non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=player_embedded]

What are the most iconic screen shots from 1980s era videogames?

What are the most iconic screen shots from 1980s era videogames? 9 answers on Quora

What are the most iconic screen shots from 1980s era videogames?

Why did Amazon pull the plug on Wikileaks and will it bite them?

Why did Amazon pull the plug on Wikileaks and will it bite them? 6 answers on Quora

Why did Amazon pull the plug on Wikileaks and will it bite them?