Round-robin (with Claude)
A few days ago I had a coffee in Paris with my long-time friend (and former Statistics & Computing editor) Gilles Celeux, and he mentioned me stopping solving and posting maths puzzles like those weekly published by Le Monde. They have indeed vanished with the retirement of the authors, but Gilles ...
Reading notes on Code That Fits in Your Head by Mark Seemann
Last month, Vicki Boykis recommended the book “Code that Fits in Your Head” by Mark Seemann.
I was intrigued, especially by her takeaway that “Writing good software should be a slow and deliberate craft”.
The book reminded of Th... [Read more...]
Some everyday data tasks: a few hints with R
It is important to know how to reshape a dataframe into a form that might be more suitable for the analyses we intend to perform. For me, it is also important to know how to do this with base R, without using any other packages. Yes, I know that...
Ihaka Lecture
I gave the first of this year’s Ihaka Lectures at the University of Auckland this past July. It revisited and partially updated things I’ve been talking about for the past eighteen months or so on trust in data visualization (and b... [Read more...]
Announcing AI in Production 2027
AI in Production is about the reality of running AI and machine learning systems, not just building them. The talks come from people who have shipped something and lived with what came next: what worked, what surprised them, what they would do di...
From Raw Data to Regulatory Results: Clinical Trial Programming in R using the pharmaverse workshop
Join our workshop on From Raw Data to Regulatory Results: Clinical Trial Programming in R using the pharmaverse, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! Here’s some more info: Title: From Raw Data to Regulatory Results: Clinical Trial Programming in R using the pharmaverse Date: Thursday, ... [Read more...]
Why ACF Is More Than Just a Plot
1 Introduction
Two observations can have the same units, come from the same source, and still require a different kind of reasoning simply because one was recorded before the other.
That is the defining feature of time series data: order c...
The Resource Project: Tell R How Much Memory You Need
Fit a cross-validated elastic net with cv.glmnet(x, y) on a design matrix that comfortably fits in memory, and the call can still fail. The reason is that the function needs several times the size of x while it runs, and nothing anywhere in your sc...
R-Community A moderated Google Group to share R knowledge
For R users that are just starting with R or that have been using it for years [Read more...]
Dual scaled y-axis with ggplot()
I have often found myself needing to plot a single graph with two y-axes having different scales. For example, this might be useful for representing temperature and rainfall data at a given location. Unfortunately, doing this with ggplot() is no...
Institutions Are a Package Deal: What a Correlation Can’t Tell You About the Rule of Law
This post asks how institutions should be conceptualized and analyzed: can the rule of law (and other institutions) sensibly be examined one at a time, or do they need to be treated as parts of an interdependent system?
The post Institutions Are a Package Deal: What a Correlation Can’t ...
From Census Data to Demographic Analysis with ARcenso: A Reproducible Workflow in R
Read it in: Español. Population censuses are a key source of information for understanding the composition of populations and how they change across regions within a country. They provide essential evidence for research, the design and evaluation of public policies, and informed decision-making.
Working with census data typically involves ... [Read more...]
NZ and US petrol (‘gasoline’) and diesel prices by @ellis2013nz
This is another short, simple blog post building a chart I am going to be updating regularly as part of monitoring the impact of the slow-burn fuel crisis caused by the USA war with Iran.
I have a page on this website with a few charts on the fuel cri...
When AI coding assistants waste rather than save time
The time savings are often offset by dead end pursuits
There’s a lot of skill in using AI coding assistance in ways that are effective and actually save your time. I find in many cases, if you jump onto these tools too soon in a project, you end... [Read more...]
The GIS Research Assistant Job Has Transformed
I realized this week that I won’t be hiring a GIS focused research assistant the same way as I used to.
Claude Code is just too good at GIS in R now. I guess this happened around the release of Opus 4.7. I just hadn’t really pushed the coding ...
Windows ARM64 comes to R-universe
Attentive package authors already noticed something new in their r-universe page over the past few weeks: R-universe has quietly started building and checking packages for Windows ARM64.
https://ropensci.r-universe.dev/pdftools#checktable
https://cra... [Read more...]
The Journey of {nycOpenData}: From Classroom to Community
FADE IN
Nine students in the M.S. in Psychology Research program at Brooklyn College, New York City (NYC), USA are taking the course Reproducible Psychological Research, where they are learning how to code for the first time. All of them have their c... [Read more...]
Introducing the Bioconductor Student-ECR Council
Announcing the Bioconductor Student-ECR Council
From an idea that hatched during the EuroBioC2026 Birds of a Feather session, we are super excited to announce the formation of the Student-ECR Council!
As a newly established Council, we aim...
Is SAS Still Used, and Is It Worth Keeping?
SAS is almost 50 years old. It predates the web, and it predates most of the open source tools data teams reach for today. While old, it is not obsolete. SAS remains central to clinical research, banking, insurance and other regulated industries,...
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