I’ll freely admit that even as a postdoc I suffer from quite a bit of impostor syndrome, more so than when I was a grad student. Although this feeling is widespread among academics, it is not impossible to beat. Looks like everyone has decided to speak out about it this week on the academic blogosphere. [...] Read more – ‘Imposter week’.
A few weeks back I gave a talk at the local Berkeley R meetup group. The idea was to help people not make the same mistakes I made when I first started out learning R. It was the first time I made an entire presentation with Deck.js and I generated the syntax highlighted R code [...] Read more – ‘An intro to R’.
I’ve neglected this blog for quite some time but I’m getting around to finishing up a bunch of draft posts. But here is a quick one: Listing objects in your global environment A simple ls() doesn’t really tell you enough useful information at a glance. Most often I just want to know what I named [...] Read more – ‘Two incredibly useful functions to throw into your .rprofile’.
I searched around to see if there was a blog post somewhere describing how to customize one’s .rprofile but was surprised to find just one outdated post. So here is quick intro on the topic. If you are a power R user, you already know about what it does. For those of you that don’t, [...] Read more – ‘Customizing your .rprofile’.
In early May I had the opportunity to attend a workshop on using high performance computing in R hosted at Nimbios. I’ve been meaning to write a summary of the meeting ever since but got sidetracked by various other projects. Since a collaborator recently asked for meeting notes I finally took the time to write [...] Read more – ‘HPC for biological research’.
I had a fantastic time at the DataCite summer 2011 meeting: Data and the Scholarly Record: The Changing Landscape [full schedule] that happened right here in Berkeley. In addition to great talks, I was pretty stoked to interact with a diverse group of people (practicing scientists/data researchers to publishers/repository managers) and also connect with twitter folks IRL. [...] Read more – ‘DataCite 2011, recap’.
As an ecologist working on climate change questions, I’ve always found it rather tedious to acquire and process climate data, especially when dealing with large spatiotemporal scales. Although many agencies provide free access to climate data, there is often some overhead (typically one to two days) before the data are made available for download via [...] Read more – ‘Climate datasets in R’.
Lately I’ve come to rely on a whole bunch of “2.0″ tools that I now find indispensable. I tried and given up on many products (e.g. Papers and its ios app) but below is a list of tools that I find myself using several times each day. I’ve chosen to highlight a few that don’t [...] Read more – ‘A roundup of academic workflow tools’.
I’ve been battling memory limits in R for over two years. Although R has numerous resources for high-performance computing, I still couldn’t get around hardware limitations. Things really got out of control last summer when I started analyzing data on how climate change influences population synchrony across large spatiotemporal gradients. My datasets were simply too [...] Read more – ‘R + EC2 + RStudio Server’.
Unless you regularly use particular R packages, it’s becomes difficult to stay on top of updates and bug fixes. Updates usually also include significant improvements in performance. I wrote this short snippet of code which I run about once a month to keep up on updates. This short bit of code will give you a [...] Read more – ‘Staying up to date on R packages’.
Thanks for stopping by Inundata. Over the last few years, my work has undergone a major transformation from small-scale single investigator field projects to large scale efforts with big heterogeneous datasets and multiple investigators. As part of the process, I’ve learned a variety new skills to deal with the flood of data. My motivation behind [...] Read more – ‘Welcome to Inundata’.
