Adding Wolfram Alpha Widgets to Your Blog

I watched this video from Stephen Wolfram. It is a bit of a promotional piece, but if I had done as much as this guy I reckon every time I opened my mouth it would sound a bit promotional.
There are some interesting widgets in Wolfram and you can drop them into your blog, web site etc. They are just bits of html that load from wolframs servers and allow users to input some variables. I have put the 'tell me about my city' one at the bottom of all the blog posts here. It is a full width widget, so had to put it there so it wouldn't obscure the everything I am trying to say. The gallery of available widgets is here and you can make your own if the long list does not suit you.

Working with CSO data in R

The Central Statistics Office produces a wide range of data about the Irish people. It can be filtered and extracted in a number of formats including CSV. This makes it ideal for importing into R.
For no specific reason I took the unemployment data for Ireland from 2002 to the present. This is what a financial crash looks like:

I am an R newbie, so the x-axis is a bit messed up, but you get the idea. I will fiddle with this a bit more in the coming days to see if I can find out anything interesting.

Some Statistics Learning Resources

As part of my stats learning I decided to go over my old college text book. Bit out of date at this stage. It refers to pencil and paper and even log graph paper. That said it is well written and was on my shelf. It only took a couple of hours to go over it and refresh my mind. Turns out I understood it better then I thought at the time :) I didn't spend too much time on it as I reckon the online stuff is going to be better.

I started yesterday with the manuals for R. They are pretty good, but not the most exciting way to get to grips with the system. I tried out a course from Code School this morning and it is excellent. It's called 'Try R' and is sponsored by O'Reilly. The course is here. It's free and well worth the time so far.

O'Reilly gives you a bunch of resources related to big data - which I suppose is the reason why I am doing this. The O'Reilly Try-R page is here. I have started reading Big Data Now on my Kindle. Its a free e-book.

Hopefully I will get to the point of being able to import real data into R soon. There are plenty of open data initiatives around (this for example), so there is bound to be something interesting in there.

Goal 2 - 4 Goals

Bit of a mouthful that title. I am writing an Android app to track progress against the 4 goals. I started doing a bit of this a few weeks ago, so there is something there at this stage. It is however very basic. Not worth putting out into the wild just yet. Once it is even a bit useful I will release it and continue to evolve it at least over the next 3 months.
I have always been a bit of a goal tracker type person, so this is right up my street.

Goal 1 - Learn Statistics

I studied maths in college about 20 years ago and statistics was in there. It didn't interest me at the time and I never really got a handle on it. Stats seems to be everywhere now, so I am making the effort to get on top of it. I have started by downloading the R-Project software.

I have given this a bash before, but I think the discipline of the 3 month timeline in the 4 Goals books will give me the push to really get to grips with this.
Now that I have the software installed I am going to make my way through the manuals. At least as far as I think I need to. Drip, drip, drip as Seth says.
This might seem a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Learn the complex software package before the basics, but I am happy that I know the basics and don't need to bore myself unnecessarily. I'll dig into some stats sites once I know how to use the tools.

4 Goals with Zig Ziglar and Seth Godin

I have just finished my first 3 months using the Seth Godin/Zig Ziglar goal setting system. I have been doing stuff roughly like this for years, but this has been very successful. My 4 goals for the first quarter of this year were

• Lose half a stone of weight
• Read a non fiction book a week
• Get 150 customers (more on that later)
• Get proficient at JavaScript

I managed to meet the weight reduction goal. This was probably the one I most wanted. It was not easy, but the system definitely kept me on track.

I read just over 8 books in the quarter. A bit short of the 12 I had wanted, but I got a huge amount out of them. I have removed this as a goal for Q2, but am going to keep doing this anyway. 

The 150 customers did not happen at all. I am developing a product which I had intended to be on sale in the middle of the quarter. However the development has taken longer than I expected. I am just finishing off the details at the moment, so no 150 customers for Q1. I am carrying this goal over though. Hopefully this time I can make it happen. 

About 2 months in I stopped the JavaScript goal as I was happy with the level I had achieved. I switched to Android development. I am happy that I got some benefit from this goal/s, but I need to be more specific about what I want from these learning type of goals in future. 

I will go through my new Q2 goals tomorrow.