Archives: R-Project

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

National Learn to Code Day

On Saturday, I took part as a mentor in National Learn to Code Day with Ladies Learning Code. There were about 50 learners of all ages. The topic was “Using Data to Solve Problems: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Beginners”, led by Solmaz Shahalizadeh, the data team directory at Shopify in Ottawa.... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

How to learn to code

I just read a great post by Jessica Duarte on teaching beginners to code. It is all so true. Especially #5, making mistakes: You [the instructor] have to ride out the mistakes. Make them often. Let the class fix them. It’s essential for students to see and experience the process of working through mistakes. Right... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Data sharing, reproducibility and peer review

I just reviewed my first manuscript where the authors provided a reproducible analysis (i.e., they shared their data and analysis script with the reviewers). This is something my coauthors and I have tried to provide with our recent studies, but it was my first time experiencing it as a referee. I think it really... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Speeding up loops in R

This is from a session I did with the UBC R Study Group. Loops can be convenient for applying the same steps to big/distributed datasets, running simulations, and writing your own resampling/bootstrapping analyses. Here are some ways to make them faster. 1. Don’t grow things in your loops. 2. Vectorize where possible. i.e. pull... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Animating time series in R

 Frame-blending is a great way to illustrate animal behaviour and other things that change over time. This got me thinking about ways to animate time series data. In R, the animation package has lots of options, but you can also build your own just by plotting over the same device window. If you save each iteration in... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Never bar graph temperatures

I’ve been going to a graduate class in science communication this semester. Doug taught us the rule that if you’re using a bar graph, the y axis must start at 0. Otherwise you end up with trickery like this: Fox News continues charting excellence. From flowingdata.com In bar graphs, area communicates magnitude. Change the lower... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

How to loop efficiently in R

My learning curve with the statistical software R has been a long one, but one of the steepest and most exciting times was learning how to write functions and loops. Suddenly I could do all kinds of things that used to seem impossible. Since then, I’ve learned to avoid for loops whenever possible. Why?... More

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