

Visualizing your email box using R - TalGalili
http://www.r-bloggers.com/sna-visualising-an-email-box-with-r/

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scorpioxy
First off, reading code like that hurts the eyes.

I didn't really understand what this graph shows. I saw that he was fetching
the from and to headers but then what? Does it show how the from contacts and
to contacts connect to each other?

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scrrr
Would be great to animate such a graph over time and see how social circles
change over the years.

Also I think theres other fascinating data in email. I'd like to run over my
inbox archives and for example extract topics of interest that occupied my
mind at certain times. It would probably be very clear when I studied what
topic, when I was sick, when I was traveling, what women I've been with etc. I
even heard somewhere it's possible to predict the chance to get Alzheimers by
analyzing the increase or decrease of vocabulary over time. Data mining is a
cool subject.

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Iwishit2
If you have to datamine the women you have been with, I wish I were you.

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dimitar
:-)

I understood he wanted to know what the women he had been with were like -
what were their interests, their social circle, etc.

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abhijitr
I really hope this isn't the way most people use R. Wouldn't it be better to
call out to a python script that pulls in the emails and spits out a CSV, and
then load _that_ into R?

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abhishektwr
This is what I call as R bias. I am regular user of R but I would never use R
to prove the point that this can be done in R. How religious is that? Sorry
about my R bashing but users of R need to understand that what kind of
problems R suppose to solve.

~~~
noahnoahnoah
I'm not going to defend this particular set of code or analysis (it's not how
I would have done it, and it's a bit silly to use R to wrap a bunch of python
code), but the notion that you shouldn't use R for this out of hand is off to
me, and just as religious as saying you should always use R.

Use whatever programming language YOU are most productive in. For me, that's
often R, even if there's a language that's "better" for a specific task --
it's not necessarily better when it's in my hands. FWIW, there's a much easier
way to do this in R as well (libcurl 7.20.0 and later includes smtp, imap, and
pop3 protocols, letting you do this without calling out to jython).

There are lots of Turing complete languages. They all can do anything. There's
no need for religion about language in any case. Hell, write your killer web
app in LOLCODE for all I care.

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mbb
Zawinski's Law? <http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html>

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yawniek
isn't working out of the box: Error in plot.window(...) : need finite 'xlim'
values

