plausibel: 2012

Feminist Wordclouds

I recently read something about the feminist movement, it's past, it's future, and so on. It kind of all started with a documentary about the way women are shown in Italian TV, which is quite amazing. It tells a sobering tale about the position of women in Italian society. Here's the link.

Then I read an interesting interview in the guardian with a person they called "Britains leading young feminist." It's a good long read.

And then finally today, I read another article claiming that strip clubs are normal and that this is a good thing.

I'll leave it up to you to make up your mind, but I'll leave you with a quiz. Tell me which of the following two word clouds belongs to which article? [I know you are clever enough so you can tell by the size of the cloud.

Apr

One useful innovation for Ryanair

Here is my suggestion: why does Ryanair in it's confirmation email not have a subject line that is actually conveying some information about the flight concerned? Currently, the subject line of such a confirmation email is

Ryanair Travel Itinerary - Don't Forget You MUST Check-in Online and Print Off your Boarding Pass

If you fly with Ryanair frequently, your inbox will be stuffed with those subject headings.

Apr

US House Prices, Default and Bankruptcy Rates in R

Some time ago I got inspired by a post on r-bloggers.com, showing the housing bubble in several US cities, nicely done with ggplot. I extended this to incorporate two measures of problems in the consumer credit markets: the percentage of people with a new bankruptcy, and the percentage of people with a new foreclosure, in each quarter from 2006 up to the end of 2011. The data are public (S&P Case-Shiller and NY Fed credit data).

Feb

Reading Code

Code Readability is maybe the most important part of producing reproducible research. If it's impossible (i.e. very costly) for somebody else to read/understand the computer code that underlies your results, then the odds are that they will never be able or willing to reproduce and check your results. This is a big problem if we want to produce credible results.

Jan

Illustrating the Deferred Acceptance Algorithm with R

The Deferred Acceptance Algorithm (DAA) goes back to Gale and Shapley (1962). They introduce a rather simple algorithm that finds a stable matching for example for college admissions or in a marriage market. In a marriage market where M men have preferences over W women, and men take the role of the proposing party, the DAA produces what is called the M-stable matching: each man strictly prefers the M-stable matching to any other potential matching.