Book Description

How do you use R to import, manage, visualize, and analyze real-world data? With this short, hands-on tutorial, you learn how to collect online data, massage it into a reasonable form, and work with it using R facilities to interact with web servers, parse HTML and XML, and more. Rather than use canned sample data, you’ll plot and analyze current home foreclosure auctions in Philadelphia.

This practical mashup exercise shows you how to access spatial data in several formats locally and over the Web to produce a map of home foreclosures. It’s an excellent way to explore how the R environment works with R packages and performs statistical analysis.

• Parse messy data from public foreclosure auction postings
• Plot the data using R’s PBSmapping package
• Import US Census data to add context to foreclosure data
• Use R’s lattice and latticeExtra packages for data visualization
• Create multidimensional correlation graphs with the pairs() scatterplot matrix package

About the Author
Jeremy Leipzig is a bioinformatics software developer at DuPont Crop Genetics. He has conducted academic research in viral integration, metagenomics, schizophrenia, and alternative splicing. While a graduate student, he developed one of the first faculty-review websites and wrote “Work Issues in Software Engineering”, a survey-based study of “death march” projects. Download Now »

Book Description

If you’re an experienced programmer willing to crunch data, this concise guide will show you how to use machine learning to work with email. You’ll learn how to write algorithms that automatically sort and redirect email based on statistical patterns. Authors Drew Conway and John Myles White approach the process in a practical fashion, using a case-study driven approach rather than a traditional math-heavy presentation.

This book also includes a short tutorial on using the popular R language to manipulate and analyze data. You’ll get clear examples for analyzing sample data and writing machine learning programs with R.

• Mine email content with R functions, using a collection of sample files
• Analyze the data and use the results to write a Bayesian spam classifier
• Rank email by importance, using factors such as thread activity
• Use your email ranking analysis to write a priority inbox program
• Test your classifier and priority inbox with a separate email sample set

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Using R
Chapter 2 Data Exploration
Chapter 3 Classification: Spam Filtering
Chapter 4 Ranking: Priority Inbox Download Now »

Book Description

It’s tough to argue with R as a high-quality, cross-platform, open source statistical software product—unless you’re in the business of crunching Big Data. This concise book introduces you to several strategies for using R to analyze large datasets. You’ll learn the basics of Snow, Multicore, Parallel, and some Hadoop-related tools, including how to find them, how to use them, when they work well, and when they don’t.

With these packages, you can overcome R’s single-threaded nature by spreading work across multiple CPUs, or offloading work to multiple machines to address R’s memory barrier.

• Snow: works well in a traditional cluster environment
• Multicore: popular for multiprocessor and multicore computers
• Parallel: part of the upcoming R 2.14.0 release
• R+Hadoop: provides low-level access to a popular form of cluster computing
• RHIPE: uses Hadoop’s power with R’s language and interactive shell
• Segue: lets you use Elastic MapReduce as a backend for lapply-style operations

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Getting Started
Chapter 2 snow
Chapter 3 multicore
Chapter 4 parallel
Chapter 5 A Primer on MapReduce and Hadoop Download Now »

Book Description

Moodle is a virtual learning environment that is being used in more and more schools worldwide. It is ideal for teaching a younger age group as interactive lessons enable children to learn quicker and with greater ease.

Moodle 2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds Beginner’s Guide will help you to adapt your existing lesson plans to online Moodle courses and will give you ideas to create new activities, quizzes, and puzzles to make the learning process fun and interactive for young children.

The interactivity of Moodle means that it is perfect for teaching younger children as they can learn by watching, listening, and doing. Learn how to create activities and quizzes that are specially adapted for younger children and are quick and easy for you to incorporate in Moodle. Other highlights include spot-the-difference exercises, games, and embedded puzzles.

Teaching young children has just got easier with the help of Moodle to create fun, interactive, and informative learning activities.

What you will learn from this book:

• Create a course and find your way around Moodle
• Use the Moodle Database module to create story-telling activities
• Create visual spot-the-difference exercises using the lesson module
• Embed visualizations of historic and time-based events, using the SIMILE Timeline widget Download Now »

Book Description

Schools, colleges, and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren’t making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn – and with teachers under so much pressure day-to-day, they cannot devote time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.

This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources, and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately – you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.

The book begins by showing how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources – documents, slideshows, and worksheets, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them and along the way you will learn plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.

By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn’t end there… you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and videos.

Throughout the book, the focus is on getting results fast – moving teaching material online so that lessons become more effective for students, and less work for you.

This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers Download Now »

Book Description

ZK is an open-source web development framework that enables web applications to have the rich user experiences and low development costs that desktop applications have had for years. ZK includes an Ajax-based event-driven engine, rich sets of XML User Interface Language (XUL) and XHTML components, and a markup language.

The ZK rich client framework takes the so-called server-centric approach: the content synchronization of components and the event pipelining between clients and servers are automatically done by the engine and Ajax plumbing codes are completely transparent to web application developers. Therefore, the end users get rich user interfaces with similar engaged interactivity and responsiveness to that of desktop applications, while for programmers, development remains similar in simplicity to that of desktop applications.

This book is a Developer’s Guide that steps you through the ZK framework with examples. It starts with installing and configuring ZK and takes you on to integrate it with other frameworks. By the time you are through the book you will be able to build an application on your own.

About the Author
Hans-Jurgen Schumacher studied mathematics at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Since 17 years he is working as a Software Developer and Architect. Right now he is in the position of a Senior Architect for J2EE. One of his special fields are GUIs for web applications as well as Improvements in the Software Build process. Download Now »