The blog of John D. Cook
From the monthly archives:
Here’s another quote from Anthony O’Hagan’s book Bayesian Inference.
All classical inference statements … are probability statements about x given θ, phrased so as to appear to be probability statements about θ.
Emphasis in the original.
Related posts:
Four reasons to use Bayesian inference
Four pillars of Bayesian statistics
{ 1 comment }
Newly coined terms heard on Twitter
Occam’s labotomy
Overdue diligence
Urban legends etc. debunked
Garbage On The Internet Forwarded As Truth
L. D. Rafey left a comment on my spherical trig post with a link to example problems
Spherical trig from KryssTal
New blog devoted to VMWare, automation, PowerShell, scripting, Linux, and random system administration tasks
Random IT Musings
War story of building an enormous installer program
Installing Software with 50,000 Images
“… unusual among philosophical arguments in actually having important practical consequences.”
Modern Science and the Bayesian-Frequentist Controversy
Thomas Sowell’s take on the economic downturn
The housing boom and bust
{ 0 comments }
Douglas Crockford’s book JavaScript: The Good Parts is terrific. Crockford is both a critic of and advocate for JavaScript. He’s quite frank about the language’s faults. His book is the clearest exposition of the pitfalls of JavaScript that I’ve seen. But he also believes there’s a great language at the heart of JavaScript. He doesn’t just complain about the bad parts; he explains how to avoid them. He has identified his recommended subset of the language. He has written programming style guide intended to increase the chances that JavaScript code does what the programmer intends. And he has written a tool, JSLint, to warn of potential problems. (Crockford reminds me of Luke Skywalker, convinced that there is good in Darth Vader and determined to rescue him from the dark side of the force.)
I wish someone would write a book for R analogous to the one Crockford wrote for JavaScript.
The R language has a lot in common with JavaScript. Both are Lisp-like languages at their core with C-like syntax. Both are dominant languages in their respective niches: R in academic statistics and JavaScript in web browsers. (R doesn’t have the monopoly in statistics that JavaScript has in the browser, but it’s still pervasive.) Both languages are powerful but maddening to debug. JavaScript has an undeserved reputation for being ugly because it is typically used to program the browser DOM; it’s the DOM that’s buggy and non-standard, not JavaScript. Similarly, R’s reputation may suffer from the numerous poorly written modules implemented in R.
Related posts:
Five kinds of subscripts in R
R programming coming from other languages
Programming language fatigue
Programming language subsets
{ 8 comments }
