Slides from OSCON

OSCON 2009 has been a blast so far, and I’ve really been enjoying the presentations and meeting people from different walks of the open-source world. Tim O’Reilly’s call to service to improve the way our government works was particularly stirring. And Mike Driscoll gave an awesome and very well-attended talk about visualizing data sets (especially big data) in R. His example of building up a complex graphic in lattice from scratch was particularly effective.

I had a great time giving our talk with Danese Cooper — I think we’ll try the double-act format again sometime. The talk was broken up into two parts: in the first, I talked about risk and seven things everyone should know about statistics and probability; in the second, Danese introduced R and showed what you can do with it. We had a great crowd and lots of great questions, and there’s been a lot of interest in R at the REvolution Computing booth on the exhibition floor.

For those who were at the talk, I’ve uploaded the slides (the link is below). If you weren’t at the talk, there aren’t too many details in the slides in the first section: it’s picture-heavy, and you might have had to be there. What’s not on the slides is the answer to the question posed on the title. I said no: the improved statistical literacy in the mainstream media, better visualizations, and an awesome open-source tool for statistical analysis (R, of course!) gives me hope that we all have a better concept of risk these days. The second section has links to some great R applications and an example of simulating the birthday problem with foreach.

R we f#¢$ed? Why We Don’t Understand Risk, and How it Dooms Us All: Download Slides (PDF 2.5Mb)

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