by Joseph Rickert
Earlier this month the Bay Area useR Group (BARUG) held it annual lightning talk meeting. This is by far our most popular meeting format: eight, 15 minute talks (12 minutes speaking and 3 minutes Q & A while the next speaker is setting up) packed into a two hour time slot. The intensity seems to really energize the speakers and engaged the audience.
Bradley Shanrock-Solberg kicked off the event with delightful example of an R based Monte Carlo simulation based on his wildpoker package that you can find on CRAN. I have never seen a more prepared lightning talk presenter: high energy, a royal flush presentation and a four color printed hand out just in case you have trouble keeping up with him for the 12 minutes. In a series of well conceived plots Bradley showed how, for a number of different poker variations, the best hand changes as the game progresses. The number of players who start the game, the number who stay until the showdown, wildcards and many more contingent events dynamically change the value of your hand. Bradley is definitely the guy for your next trip to Vegas.
If you are a poker player, you will definitely want to check out his package and supplementary material: his paper on Winning More at Dealers Choice Poker and his example of why rules of thumb fail.
William Sundstrom, professor of Economics at Santa Clara University, gave an entertaining and thought provoking presentation on teaching R to undergraduate Econometrics students. One interesting observation that generated some discussion was that even though today’s students are “digital natives” having grown up using intelligent devices of all kinds, many of them are nevertheless “digital naïfs”. The following slide, a reprint of an email from one of …read more
Source:: http://revolutionanalytics.com
