Interactive web graphs with R - Overview and googleVis tutorial

Today I feel very lucky, as I have been invited to the Royal Statistical Society conference to give a tutorial on interactive web graphs with R and googleVis.

I prepared my slides with RStudio, knitr, pandoc and slidy, similar to my Cambridge R talk. You can access the RSS slides online here and you find the original R-Markdown file on github. You will notice some HTML code in the file, which I had to use to overcome my knowledge gaps of Markdown or its limitations. However, my output format will always be HTML, so that should be ok. To convert the Rmd-file into a HTML slidy presentation execute the following statements on the command line:

Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('googleVis_at_RSS_2012.Rmd')"
pandoc -s -S -i -t slidy --mathjax googleVis_at_RSS_2012.md 
  -o googleVis_at_RSS_2012.html

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My neighbor damaged my back yard, but won't file an insurance claim. What can I do?

Q: My neighbor damaged my back yard as the result of one of his do-it-yourself projects. Now he won't turn in a claim to his insurer. And he won't tell me who his insurer is. What can I do?

A: We get variations on this question a lot. Common ones involve a neighbor driving over a mailbox or into a fence. And we periodically get calls from people wondering if we have a database listing who insures who. (We don't.)

First, try to deal directly with your neighbor to get him to pay for the damage. If he's worried that the claim will drive up his premiums (or lead to his policy being cancelled), he may still be willing to compensate you for the sake of the relationship and to stave off the possibility of your taking him to court.

If that doesn't work, you can contact your agent or insurer to see if the damage is covered on your own policy. Or you could decide to take legal action against the neighbor, either in small claims or a higher court.