Time to Accept It: publishing in the Journal of Statistical Software

I’m reblogging this article mostly for myself. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll see that recently I published an article on organizing R code that mentioned using packages to organize that code. One of the advantages of doing so is that the work you’ve done is easily distributed. If the methods are novel in some way, you may even get a paper in J. Stat. Soft. or the R Journal that helps people learn how to use your software and exposes the methodology to a wider audience. Therefore we should know something about those journals. (I recently got a good reply on Reddit about the difference between these journals.)

The Geokook.

When I was considering submitting my paper on psd to J. Stat. Soft. (JSS), I kept noticing that the time from “Submitted” to “Accepted” was nearly two years in many cases.  I ultimately decided that was much too long of a review process, no matter what the impact factor might be (and in two years time, would I even care?).  Tonight I had the sudden urge to put together a dataset of times to publication.

Fortunately the JSS website is structured such that it only took a few minutes playing with XML scraping (*shudder*) to write the (R) code to reproduce the full dataset.  I then ran a changepoint (published in JSS!) analysis to see when shifts in mean time have occurred.  Here are the results:

Top: The number of days for a paper to go from ‘Submitted’ to ‘Accepted’ as a function of the cumulative issue index (each paper is an “issue”…

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Start Getting and Working with Data with “Data Acquisition and Manipulation with Python”

This news is a few weeks late, but better late than never!

Downloading S&P 500 Stock Data from Google/Quandl with R (Command Line Script)

DISCLAIMER: Any losses incurred based on the content of this post are the responsibility of the trader, not me. I, the author, neither take responsibility for the conduct of others nor offer any guarantees. None of this should be considered as financial advice; the content of this article is only for educational/entertainment purposes.

While most Americans have heard of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), most people active in finance consider the S&P 500 stock index to be the better barometer of the overall American stock market. The 500 stocks included in the index are large-cap stocks seen as a leading indicator for the performance of stocks overall. Thus the S&P 500 and its component stocks are sometimes treated as “the market.”

Deceit in Politics; An Analysis of PolitiFact Data

Naturally, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been accused of lying; if I had told you in 2012 that both candidates from both political parties were being accused of lies, you would likely have given me a blank, disinterested stare; this alone is not shocking. What is shocking, though, is the level of deceit and how central a theme it was to this campaign season.