Working with University of Arizona’s secure wireless network on Ubuntu Linux

I’m sure that someone out there is struggling with this. So, here is a quick screenshot of the security settings, in the Network Manager applet, that you need to get Ubuntu to run on the University of Arizona’s secure wireless network. The same will apply for Debian and most GNOME-based desktops.

…and you’ll want to put your NetID username and password in there, for the last two entries.

Fairly straightforward once you get it.

New R code for ‘moving’ or ‘running’ correlations

Someone at the lab asked how to ‘do something like running means, but with correlations’. I couldn’t find any existing code that would make a good example, so I just wrote some myself.

It would be nice to do this without looping. If anyone has a clever way to do this, please do let me know.

# 2011-03-04
# v0.01

MovingCor <- function(x, y, window.size=21, method="pearson") {
  # Computes moving correlations between two vectors with symmetrical windows.
  #
  # Args:
  #   x: One of the two vectors whose correlation is to be calculated.
  #   y: The other vector. Note that it must be of the same length as x.
  #   window.size: The size of windows to be used for each calculated
  #                correlation. Note that if even numbers are chosen, the
  #                window will not be skewed as there will be one extra value
  #                on the upper-side of the window. Default size is 21.
  #   method: The method of correlation. May be: "pearson", "kendall", or
  #           "spearman". Default is "pearson".
  #
  # Returns:
  #   A vector of the moving correlations.
  n <- length(x)
  # Setup a few catches for error handling.
  if (TRUE %in% is.na(y) || TRUE %in% is.na(x)) {
    stop("Arguments x and y cannot have missing values.")
  }
  if (n &lt;= 1 || n != length(y)) {
    stop("Arguments x and y have different lengths: ",
         length(x), " and ", length(y), ".")
  }
  out <- rep(NA, round(window.size/2))  # Stuffing the returned vector.
  for (value in seq(from = 1, to = n - (window.size - 1))) {
    value.end &lt;- value + (window.size - 1)
    out <- append(out, cor(x[value:value.end],
                           y[value:value.end],
                           method = method))
  }
  out <- append(out, rep(NA, n - length(out)))  # Finish stuffing.
  return(out)
}

EDIT:
There are more nimble functions out there for this, and other window-related tasks. See the caTools‘s runmean function. The package zoo also has a number of quick functions including rollmean and the more general rollapply.