I work in a company that shifted from being R&D-driven to being project-driven. It is official since this 2013 but we saw it coming: the main pieces of memory are Powerpoint slides since a few years. Everything is in Powerpoint, from agendas, discussions, presentations to minutes. Even when modelers want to show some results, they put them on a slide deck first … For presentations I used to use Beamer but installing the LaTeX toolchain on a restricted, company-owned Windows laptop was a long and cumbersome process. I made a first presentation in Reveal.js this week. And I love it! ...

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) released the Open Data Index, along with details on how their methodology. The index contains 70 countries, with UK having the best score and Cyprus the worst score. In fact the first places are trusted by the UK, the USA and the Northern European countries (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden). And Belgium? Well, Belgium did not score very well: 265 / 1,000. The figure below shows its aggregated score (with green: yes, red: no, blue: unsure). ...

In my opinion privacy issues are a by-product of information conservation times reaching infinite. For centuries and more humans were used to their own type of memory. When information reaches the brain, it is stored in short-term memory. When relevant and/or repeated, it is gradually consolidated into long-term memory (this is roughly the process). The invention of oral transmission of knowledge, written transmission (incl. Gutenberg) and, to a certain extend, internet, all these successively increased the duration of retention of information shared with others. The switch from oral to written transmission of knowledge also sped up the dissemination of information as well as its fixed, un-(or less-) interpreted nature. ...

A few months ago Google decided to retire its Google Reader (it stopped working on July 1st, 2013). As it was simple, effective and good-looking, a lot of people complained about this demise. A few days ago The Old Reader, one of the most successful replacement for Google Reader, also announced it will close its gates, only to keep early registered users. And today Feedly, another successful alternative, announced it is introducing a pro version at 5.00 USD per month. ...

A few days ago Prince William and Duchess Catherine of Cambridge gave birth to Prince George. Today at the office we were wondering if we will see more babies names George in UK. Very important question indeed! So I went to the UK National Statistics website and looked for baby names in UK. Let’s focus on England and Wales only. There are two datasets for what we are looking for: one for the period 1904-1994 (by 10 years steps) and one for 2004 (if we want to be consistent with the 10 years step in the first dataset). I extracted the ranking relevant for us here: for babies called William, George (and Harry, William’s brother). The data is here. ...

Following my previous posts on how to read/write Excel files from Matlab here is the way I use to read/write Excel files from R. Again it seems the Apache POI java library made developers’life easy. I use here the simple-yet-powerful xlsx package ( documentation here in PDF; project website). Here you don’t need to install any additional files, installing the xlsx package from R does all the dirty work that for you. Then, reading an Excel file is very easy: ...

Last week Google announced it will shut down its Reader service. It is a web-based RSS reader. It therefore allows to be kept updated of news from around the net in a central location. I liked the service for 3 reasons (on top of the fact it’s free, 0$, to use): It’s web-based, accessible from anywhere/everywhere with a simple browser; It’s text-based, you can quickly scan headlines and use the powerful search function from Google; It’s backed by an API so you can use it via different apps on different platforms and they all stay synchronised (the web/mobile version of Reader is not as efficient as the web/desktop version; hence the proliferation of apps using Reader as a backbone). Of course it frustrated a lot of people, from scientists to consultants … to name a few only. People are looking for alternative ( you can do a search on Google while the Search service is still working). Feedly is cited very often as the next best alternative. However its nice, graphical interface conflicts with my second reason to like Google Reader: it’s text-based. The Old Reader looks also interesting, it is text-based but no apps on different platforms yet. But both are also proprietary and can be turned off (or changed to a pay-for-use model) at any moment :-( ...

I was trying to reproduce the map of the GAVI Alliance eligible countries (btw I was surprised India is eligible - but that’s the beauty of relying on numbers only and not assumptions) in R. This is the original map (there are 57 countries eligible): I started to use the R package rworldmap because it seemed the most appropriate for this task. Everything went fine. Most of the time was spent converting the list of countries from plain English to plain “ISO3” code as required (ISO3 is in fact ISO 3166-1 alpha-3). I took my source from Wikipedia. ...

We wish you a very happy new year 2013!

Well, there is nothing new in this statement. The smartphone OS Android is catching up and even overtaking its rival iOS in many domains: more activated products per day and per year in 2011, more Samsung Galaxy S3 (running Android) sold in Q3 2012 than iPhone4 and 5S (running iOS), more devices worldwide, catching up Apple’s market share in tablets, … All this is summarised in an infographics MBA Online designed (the original address is here: http://www.mbaonline.com/android/ - click at your own risk). It is sweet and colorful, with lots of numbers and some references in the end. Unfortunately these references are embedded in the image so you cannot click on them if you ever want to read more info. ...