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Tracking & Analytics:
Monitoring browsing behavior for analytics or marketing purposes
Types of Cookies:
Session Cookies:
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Used for things like keeping you logged in during a single session
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Used for remembering login credentials, settings, etc.
First-Party Cookies:
Set by the website you're visiting directly
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Set by other domains (usually advertisers) embedded in the website
Commonly used for tracking across multiple sites
Authentication cookies are a special type of web cookie used to identify and verify a user after they log in to a website or web application.
What They Do:
Once you log in to a site, the server creates an authentication cookie and sends it to your browser. This cookie:
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Prevents you from having to log in again on every page you visit
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What's Inside an Authentication Cookie?
Typically, it contains:
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Analytics cookies are cookies used to collect data about how visitors interact with a website. Their primary purpose is to help website owners understand and improve user experience by analyzing things like:
How users navigate the site
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What device, browser, or location the user is from
What They Track:
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Page views and time spent on pages
Click paths (how users move from page to page)
Bounce rate (users who leave without interacting)
User demographics (location, language, device)
Referring websites (how users arrived at the site)
Here’s how you can disable cookies in common browsers:
1. Google Chrome
Open Chrome and click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner.
Go to Settings > Privacy and security > Cookies and other site data.
Choose your preferred option:
Block all cookies (not recommended, can break most websites).
Block third-party cookies (can block ads and tracking cookies).
2. Mozilla Firefox
Open Firefox and click the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner.
Go to Settings > Privacy & Security.
Under the Enhanced Tracking Protection section, choose Strict to block most cookies or Custom to manually choose which cookies to block.
3. Safari
Open Safari and click Safari in the top-left corner of the screen.
Go to Preferences > Privacy.
Check Block all cookies to stop all cookies, or select options to block third-party cookies.
4. Microsoft Edge
Open Edge and click the three horizontal dots in the top-right corner.
Go to Settings > Privacy, search, and services > Cookies and site permissions.
Select your cookie settings from there, including blocking all cookies or blocking third-party cookies.
5. On Mobile (iOS/Android)
For Safari on iOS: Go to Settings > Safari > Privacy & Security > Block All Cookies.
For Chrome on Android: Open the app, tap the three dots, go to Settings > Privacy and security > Cookies.
Be Aware:
Disabling cookies can make your online experience more difficult. Some websites may not load properly, or you may be logged out frequently. Also, certain features may not work as expected.
Once a month during the academic year, the statistics faculty select a paper for our students to read and discuss. Papers are selected based on their impact or historical value, or because they contain useful techniques or results.
Dirk Eddelbuettel and Conrad Sanderson(2014) RcppArmadillo: Accelerating R with high-performance C++ linear algebra. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 2014, 71, March, pages 1054- 1063.
Notes preparer: Jun Yan
In statistical computing with R, the Rcpp package is a breakthrough in that it greatly simplified interfacing R with C++ (Eddelbuettel and Francois, 2011). Thousands of R packages depend on, import from, or link to the Rcpp package. Such an interface often leads to drastic improvements in efficiency by writing key R functions in C++, bringing the speed of compiled languages like C++ to the interpreted language R. Package RcppArmadillo further extends the Rcpp package to easily access the C++ matrix library armadillo. This is important for many statistical applications such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, vector autoregressive models, and so on. It is an important tool for students in statistics today, especially for those who need to deal with computing-intensive tasks or who want to make their methods available for others to use through R packages. An example is the splines2 package developed by my former Ph.D. student Wenjie Wang, which offers API for C++ implementations of shape restricted splines bases.