The Summer Games are over, and here's one thing that surprised me. I had assumed that since Rio is in the southern hemisphere, where it’s currently winter, the Games would be shifted a couple months, as they were for Sydney. I’ve since learned that Rio is very pleasant in the winter
The Wall Street Journal recently published a nice, interactive graphic piece called "Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines," which contains a series of graphs showing the incidence of selected infectious diseases by state and year. Here's the one for measles. My first impression was, "Wow,
In his Walking Randomly blog, Mike Croucher shows how to fit a simple nonlinear curve using five different statistical programming libraries: R, MATLAB, Maple, Julia and Python/numpy. The idea is to provide concrete examples for a commonly asked modeling question that is simple to state but not so simple to
Whether it is 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning or 5:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon, that weekly meeting just seems to come pretty quickly doesn't it? I don't know if it is true for you, but when I begin reporting on something weekly or at any short frequency, I start thinking
One of the great things about attending the JMP Discovery Summit as a developer is hearing questions and suggestions from people with so many different applications of JMP. One JMP Scripting Language (JSL) question came up three times, so it's worth sharing. The question is, "How do I remove duplicate
When undertaking a new plumbing project, I always try to follow my two rules of plumbing. Rule One: Never start a plumbing project without beer in the fridge; you’ll get frustrated and need to take a break to calm down, and a beer works great for that. Rule Two: Never
In "How many words for red?" (and part 2), blogger Sean Roberts shows some interesting visuals of named colors. He's trying to correlate the number of names of a hue with the different perceptual space of each hue from a psychology angle. I'm always interested when the raw data for
An often-overlooked feature of the JMP Scripting Language is the ability to assign values to multiple variables in a single assignment statement. A basic example is: // assign 1 to x and 100 to y {x, y} = {1, 100}; The syntax is especially useful when the values of
In my previous JSL tip, we saw how it is faster to access matrix items than to list items. It's faster still if you don't have to access the items at all. That is, get JMP's internal code to do the looping and item access instead of doing it in
The list is one of the basic building tools for organizing data in JSL. The power of lists is that they can contain any kind of items (numbers, characters, other lists, ...), and they can grow and shrink as needed. However, if you just need a fixed list of numbers,