The new version of nullabor contains numerical measures that quantify how close the plot of the data is to the null plots in a lineup. It is very difficult to quantify all patterns that might be read from plots, so these should be taken in a spirit ofa Herculean task. The goal is to get some sense of what people are reacting to in a plot, which could be then associated with the text descriptions from people, or with data from an eyetracker.
During the week, I received final confirmation notice that the special issue of Statistical Science that Vince Carey and I put together is finally published. There are four papers from leaders in the field of statistical computing research: John Chambers, Duncan Temple Lang, Michael Lawrence and Michael Morgan (newly minted members of R Core) and Yihui Xie, Heike Hofmann and Xiaoyue Cheng. The links to the overview and the four papers are below.