What is the Most Harmful Storm in the US?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regularly publishes data on storm occurrences in the US. They make available annual data dating back to 1950 and it includes time-series, geographic proximity, and financial destruction information as well as storm characteristics (event type, width of tornado, wind gust estimates, etc.). While you could do thousands of … [Read more…]

Fixing Excel’s Sci Not Faux Pas with R

Encountered what I think is a pretty common excel problem at work today. A colleague showed me an excel spreadsheet that was reading warehouse locations as scientific notation. For example, location 05E03 was being read into excel as 5.00E+03 and if you tried to edit the cell or convert it to text, you’d be given … [Read more…]