The guys at RStudio have done a fantastic job with shiny. It is really easy to build web apps with R using shiny. With the help of Joe Cheng from RStudio we figured out a way to make googleVis work on shiny as well. This allows you to make use of the Google Charts Tools in your shiny app directly from R. What I present here are three initial examples which seem to work in most browsers.
Michael Bach, who is a professor and vision scientist at the University of Freiburg, maintains a fascinating site about visual illusions. One visual illusion really surprised me: the sigma motion. The sigma motion displays a flickering figure of black and white columns. Actually it is just a chart, as displayed below, with the columns changing backwards and forwards from black to white at a rate of about 30 transitions per second.
The data of the World Bank is absolutely amazing. I had said this before, but their updated iPhone App gives me a reason to return to this topic. Version 3 of the DataFinder App allows you to visualise the data on your phone, including motion maps, see the screen shot below. Screen shot of DataFinder 3.0 I was intrigued by the by the changes in life expectancy over time around the world.
Fitting distribution with R is something I have to do once in a while, but where do I start?
A good starting point to learn more about distribution fitting with R is Vito Ricci’s tutorial on CRAN. I also find the vignettes of the actuar and fitdistrplus package a good read. I haven’t looked into the recently published Handbook of fitting statistical distributions with R, by Z. Karian and E.