Word frequency analysis of Kafka's Metamorphosis

This is a simple analysis of the frequency of words in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Pretty Choropleth using ggplot in R

I think it's a pretty interesting graph. I got the data from the Minnesota Department of Health Website.

First time using ggplot2 in R

I used the packages XML, rgdal, maptools, and ggplot2. From XML I used readHTMLTable and got a bunch of tables from the Star Tribune 100 website. I was able to get the cities from the tables and then I used the census 2010 cities shapefile and subsetted severely by whether the city was in Minnesota and had the same name as a city from the Star Tribune 100.

I now have the points of the cities and the outline of the state of Minnesota.  Next came the hard part. I don't know a ton about Geographical Information Systems or much about Geography so I couldn't tell what coordinate system my two layers were in.  After much stumbling around I realized that the cities were in longitude and latitude and that the outline of the state of Minnesota was in something called UTM. So I used spTransform from rgdal to change coordinate systems from UTM zone 15 to longitude/latitude. After that I plotted using ggplot2 and it seems to work out.

The three dots that seem like they could be artifacts or something are probably Montevideo, Fergus Falls, and Thief River Falls.

Web Scraping for Education Data

I spent some time today and yesterday doing some data wrangling. I wondered where AP Calculus AB is offered throughout the state of Minnesota. I first went to the College Board site and found this database. There were 9 pages of results that I downloaded and then used readLines and regex to extract the zip codes for each school. There were 164 schools and only 142 unique zip codes. I used the maptools package to create the map and colored it based on the data.

First Post(Zeroth Post?)

Since I can't currently produce results, I'm going to substitute results by writing about my ambitious plans for the next few months on this blog. My plans are to 

• train a neural network to predict when a particular stock will split and then use Javascript to update stock prices daily and predict the split.
• train a neural network to predict numbers and letters and then use an HTML5 Canvas to gather data to predict on.
• put out a cool animation or graphic with Octave or R once a week.

Longer range when (if?) I figure out audio capture via HTML or Javascript it would be neat to train a neural network to detect accents.