Area 51 » Mike Grady

May 31	comment	Astronomy: The aluminum coating of the mirror in my Newtonian telescope has deteriorated. Is there a place in Belgium where it can be re-coated? But what is the "shelf life" of this answer?
May 31	proposed question	Astronomy: Are weak lensing tomography and cluster counting complementary or competing methods of better understanding the properties of dark energy?
May 31	comment	Astronomy One thing I'm interested in is the distinction between questions that would be asked on this site from what might be asked on the Statistical Analysis site. At least in academic research, a lot of cutting edge astronomy is going to be based on data mining thru the data products of new "telescopes/instruments" such as the LSST, Dark Energy Survey, Square Kilometer Array, etc, which are going to produce so much data that mining and visualization will be critical.
May 31	comment	Statistical Analysis I like the range of data analysis that is captured by the "subheading" for this site, but I think that Statistical Analysis as the major heading doesn't truly fully represent the content of a site that lives up to that sub-heading. You could argue that this subject area encompasses a good part of what Tony Hey (Microsoft Research) and others are calling the "4th paradigm of science", data intensive scientific discovery, research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/… . Is visualization of the data/analyses on-topic?
May 31	comment	Statistical Analysis: In R, how do I convert a list of data frames into one data frame? There is going to be overlap between topic sites, no matter how one splits things. I'm still hoping that we can find good ways to "join sites" into broader areas (e.g. anything you could refere as falling into "cyberinfrastructure" as the NSF defines it), such as tagging that can cross StackExchange sites. I agree that this question is off topic for this site, but it doesn't mean that someone on this site wouldn't want the answer to this question. Maybe that all comes down to Google/Bing/etc. to find things.
May 31	comment	Statistical Analysis: Where can I get tables of unemployment data for different countries? But if you add sources of data, that's endless. You could try to data mine any kind of data. Any collection of any kind of numeric, textual, etc. That's a library cataloging function, not a "how to" question. Now if you want to create a "catalog of data site", fine, but make a specific site for it. Does this split by government/public data, literature collections, digital libraries, ...?
May 31	awarded	● Advocate
May 28	awarded	● Nice Question
May 27	awarded	● Centrist
May 27	awarded	● Pioneer
May 27	proposed question	Statistical Analysis: When using k-Means Clustering for text data mining, what are some good approaches to determine the number of clusters to use?