Upgrade your skill sets with free courses

We are in the midst of the Insight Age.  We have moved beyond capturing data and are now processing information.  Properly processing the large amounts of data requires knowlege and skill sets.  Fortunately there are many ways to develop those skills.

Class Central is a website that provides a complete list of free online courses from some of the most established and prestigious universities in the world.  Websites like these are helping to make the world smaller by providing free and accessible learning resources.

I am a big fan of open courseware.  There are plenty of other places to look for open coureses.  The Open Courseware Consortium is a useful resource.  A good metasearch site like OpenCourseWare Finder is valuable as well. 

Popularity of R continues

No doubt those that read my blog know that the tools I use to do my Industrial Engineering and Operations Research work heavily rely on the open source side of software.  That is why I try to support as many open source projects such as COIN-OR, GLPK, and OpenOpt.  One tool that I love to perform Applied Math and Statistics is the statistical computing platform R.  So it comes as no surprise that I like to see how R is growing and its popularity among programmers.

A recent blog from RedMonk produced results of a programming language popularity study.  The study involved ranking popularity using common social media online sites such as Stack Overflow and GitHub.  These sites draw in a lot of programmers for their popularity around Q&A and code review.  I was surprised to see that R ranks highly compared to some very prominant programming languages.

Also interesting to note that the only other "Data Science" type of programming language I could find was Matlab.  As far as I could tell SAS, S, SPSS, Stata are still rather popular but apparently not among the programming community.

OpenOpt Suite 0.39

Hi all,

I'm glad to inform you about new OpenOpt release 0.39 (quarterly since 2007).

OpenOpt is free, even for commercial purposes, cross-platform software for mathematical modeling and (mainstream) optimization. Our website have reached 259 visitors daily, that is same to tomopt.com and ~ 1/3 of gams.com ( details ).

In the new release:

• interalg (medium-scaled solver with specifiable accuracy abs(f-f*) <= fTol): add categorical variables and general logical constraints, many other improvements
• Some improvements for automatic differentiation
• DerApproximator and some OpenOpt/FuncDesigner functionality now works with PyPy (Python with dinamic compilation, some problems are solved several times faster now)
• New solver lsmr for dense/sparse LLSP (linear least squares)
• Some bugfixes and some other changes

In our website (openopt.org) you could vote for most required OpenOpt Suite development direction(s).

National Registry of Exonerations charts with R

According to recent news (dallasnews.com) there is a new release of a public national database for wrongful convictions.  There are plenty of details in the public list including Age, Race, and how the conviction was overturned.  According to the database it seems that most of the convictions were overturned due to DNA evidence.

I thought it would be interesting to plot summaries of the details using the open source statistical computing environment R Project.  The following are the plots from the National Registry of Exonerations database.

 

Here is the R code used to create the above pie charts.


# National Registry of Exonerations
# pie charts

library(XML)

u <- "http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/detaillist.aspx"

listu <- readHTMLTable(u)

exondf <- listu[[7]]
data <- exondf[24:nrow(exondf),]
names(data) <- as.character(unlist(exondf[4,]))

# transform data
data$Age <- droplevels(data$Age)
data$Race <- droplevels(data$Race)
data$State <- droplevels(data$State)
data$Crime <- droplevels(data$Crime)
data$Sentence <- droplevels(data$Sentence)
data$Convicted <- droplevels(data$Convicted)
data$Exonerated <- droplevels(data$Exonerated)

data$AgeCNV <- as.numeric(as.character(data$Age))
data$ConvictedCNV <- as.numeric(as.character(data$Convicted))
data$ExoneratedCNV <- as.numeric(as.character(data$Exonerated))

data$AgeCNV_floor <- floor(data$AgeCNV/10)*10
data$ConfinedYrs <- data$ExoneratedCNV - data$ConvictedCNV
data$ConfinedYrs_floor <- floor(data$ConfinedYrs/5)*5

# plot pie charts

LABELS <- c("10-19","20-29","30-39","40-49","50-59","60-69","")
pie(table(data$AgeCNV_floor), labels=LABELS, main="Age Exonerated")

pie(table(data$Race), main="Race")

pie(tail(sort(table(data$State)),10), main="Top 10 States")

LABELS <- c("0-4","5-9","10-14","15-19","20-24","25-29","30-34","35+")
pie(table(data$ConfinedYrs_floor), labels=LABELS, main="Years Confined")

Google Scholar Metrics

Google Scholar, the Google produced search method for scholarly journals and publications, has a new way of tracking publication metrics.  Google Scholar Metrics for publications gives an indexed look at the publishers and figure out which publishers are cited the most.  Google Scholar Metrics will allow the searcher to find publishers that are well respected in any given field of research.  As an example here are the Top 100 Google Scholar publishers.

So I naturally want to see what Google thinks of some of the fields that I find interesting and useful.

Operations Research

1.  European Journal of Operational Research
2.  Computers & Operations Research
3.  Operations Research
4.  Journal of the Operational Research Society
5.  Annals of Operations Research

Machine Learning

1. The Journal of Machine Learning Research
2. Annual International Conference on Machine Learning
3. Machine Learning
4. European Conference on Machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases
5. International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics

Applied Statistics

1. The Annals of Applied Statistics
2.  Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics)
3.  Journal of Applied Statistics
4.  QUALITY CONTROL AND APPLIED STATISTICS
5.  International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Management Science

1.  Management Science
2.  Pest Management Science (????)
3.  Health Care Management Science
4.  Conflict Management and Peace Science (????)
5.  Computational Management Science

			The Management Science category looks like it needs a lot of work.  I didn't know there were so many other forms of Management Science.  I guess that it is too generic of a term and the age old debate continues.

OpenOpt Suite 0.38

I'm glad to inform you about new OpenOpt Suite quarter release 0.38, free (BSD license) Python-written software:

OpenOpt:

interalg can handle discrete variables (see MINLP for examples)
interalg can handle multiobjective problems (MOP)
interalg can handle problems with parameters fixedVars/freeVars
Many interalg improvements and some bugfixes
Add another EIG solver: numpy.linalg.eig
New LLSP solver pymls with box bounds handling

FuncDesigner:

Some improvements for sum()
Add funcs tanh, arctanh, arcsinh, arccosh
Can solve EIG built from derivatives of several functions, obtained by automatic differentiation by FuncDesigner

SpaceFuncs:

Add method point.symmetry(Point|Line|Plane)
Add method LineSegment.middle
Add method Point.rotate(Center, angle)

DerApproximator:

Minor changes

See also: FuturePlans.

Regards, D.

R graphic used for Facebook IPO

Apparently former Facebook intern, Paul Butler,  graphic of the Facebook social network graph is being used for Facebook's IPO.  The social network graphic is featured on Page 7 of the IPO filing.  His graphic was featured on mashable and R-bloggers not too long ago.  The graphic is of Facebook connections between city centers around the world.  Paul used an ingenious method of color transparency and great circle arcs to display the social network graph.

This is just one of the really cool things you can do with R.  Not only is R used as a visual medium but also to calculate the great circle paths.  This is really neat to see R in such a high profile setting.  If you want to learn more about R you can read an IEORTools post about R links for beginners on World Statistics Day.  Also there are many books that you can buy on R programming at the IEORTools Online Store.