Isotonic regression is a great tool to keep in your repertoire; it's like weighted least-squares with a monotonicity constraint. Why is this so useful, you ask? Take a look at the example relationship below. (You can follow along with the Python code here). Let's imagine that the true relationship between x and y is characterized piece-wise by a sharp
Thanks to Sam Arbesman (@arbesman) for featuring Dan and my paper, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code, on his excellent Wired Science blog, the Social Dimension. You can read the article here, and, as a reminder, all of the code and data from the paper is available in this github repository. Abstact
Do you contract for IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS services like Amazon Web Services or SalesForce? Do you provide SaaS services like “cloud-based applications” or “web applications?” What state are you headquartered in? What states are your servers located in? What states are your customers in, even if for just a moment? Depending on your answer to the
Postgres has finally come to RDS! Want to know how these instances stack up on a naive pgbench test? Below is a table of simple pgbench results taken over a 60 second period. All RDS instances were launched into us-east-1a, and pgbench (9.4devel) was run from an m2.4xlarge in us-east-1a as well. TPS t1.micro
While many Amazon Web Services resources with "state" have CloudWatch sensors available, AWS VPCs and tunnels unfortunately do not. If you're ever in need of a solution to monitor and log the status of VPC tunnels back to another data center or office, my gist below will be right up your alley. It uses
Oracle ORION is a powerful tool for evaluating realistic OLTP and DSS/DW I/O performance. ORION should be a part of every Oracle professional's toolkit for build QA and performance tuning. I've previously used it on this blog to show the performance of Amazon's hi1.4lxarge SSD-backed instances and newer hs1.8xlarge instances with 117GB of RAM and 48TB of
Benchmarking I/O with Oracle ORION is an important part of planning, baselining, and performance-tuning Oracle environments. I've previously provided ORION results for the hi1.4xlarge SSD-backed instance class, and based on some recent work, I wanted to provide an update for the newer hs1.8xlarge instance class. Below you'll find hs1.8xlarge Oracle ORION benchmark results with the following
If you're like me, you love ipython notebook but often write R. RStudio's integrated RMarkdown is nice, but for some contexts like quick demos or basic training, a browser-based interface is unbeatable. What if we could get the best of both worlds - an ipython notebook for R? The answer is rNotebook, and if you
Last week, I shared that Dan Katz and I had finally published a draft of our paper, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The U.S. Code. We'd previewed this research on Computational Legal Studies years ago. Since then, we've received great feedback and a number of questions. The most common question, even among legal professionals,
Four years ago, Dan Katz and I began working on a project to measure the complexity of the law. Its genesis was, in every sense, an accident; in order to properly identify citations to the IRC in our VTR empirical review of U.S. Tax Court decisions, we had to deal with the informal, non-Blue
