In 2005, the cardboard box was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame (along with Candy Land).
In our brief this week we consider whether analytics has anything to say about cardboard boxes. Our course spotlight is on:
- Jan 3 – 31: R Programming Advanced
- Jan 24 – Feb 21: Visualization in R with ggplot2
See you in class!
Analytics Meets the Cardboard Box
Amidst the AI-driven robots and conveyor belts that are showcased in this video of an Amazon fulfillment center, can you spot the one technology that looks much the same as it did when it was invented a century and a quarter ago? In 1895, the first […]
Historical Spotlight: Bell Labs and Statistics
95 years ago, Bell Labs was founded as a joint project of AT&T and Western Electric. Its primary mission was R&D for its parents’ fast-growing telecommunications businesses. Since that time […]
Course Spotlight
Our course spotlight is on two courses that will help R users further develop their R skills:
Jan 3 – 31: R Programming Advanced
Intended for students with several years of programming under their belts, this course will teach you to:
- Create function calls (including functions with delayed execution, and functions within functions)
- Translate defined statistical algorithms into code
- Work with classes and write user-defined classes
Your instructor is Daniel Chen, author of Pandas for Everyone (Addison Wesley) .
Jan 24 – Feb 21: Visualization in R with ggplot2
This course is ideal for statistical analysts who need to make, format, label, and adjust graphs using R. You will learn to:
- Create basic plots (scatterplots, histograms, and barcharts)
- Add extra variables with aesthetics (like color, shape, and size) or faceting
- Display data in other forms (densityplots, boxplots, etc.) using geoms
- Overcome overplotting with drawing scatterplots of large datasets
- Add group-wise summaries and transformations to your plots
- Add labels, legends, and axes
The course, originally developed and taught by Hadley Wickham, is now taught by Randall Pruim, chair of Mathematics and Statistics department at Calvin College and director of Calvin’s Integrated Science Research Institute (ISRI).
See you in class!