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Sweave is something of a gold standard in reproducible research. It creates a dynamic document, written in a mix of LaTeX and R code where the results of the analysis (numbers, figures, tables) are automatically generated from the code and inserted into the resulting pdf document, making them easy to ... [Read more...]

I am finding myself more and more drawn to markdown rather then tex/Rnw as my standard format (not least of which is the ease of displaying the files on github, particularly now that we have automatic image uploading). One thing I miss from latex is the citation commands. (I ... [Read more...]

I have recently modified the basic workflow of my lab notebook since discovering knitr. Before, I would write code files which I could track on github, push figures created by the code to flickr, and then write a notebook entry on wordpress describing what I was doing. I’d embed ... [Read more...]

I’m not always careful in citing all the R packages I use. R actually has some rather nice built-in mechanisms to support this, so I really have no excuse. Here’s some quick examples: To cite the ouch package in publications use: Aaron A. King and Marguerite A. Butler (2009), ... [Read more...]

Just learned about the R data.table package (ht @recology_) makes R data frames into ultra-fast, SQL-like objects. One thing we get is some very nice and powerful syntax. Consider some simple data of replicate time series: To apply a function to each set of replicates, instead of We can ... [Read more...]

Yesterday my paper   appeared in early view in Evolution (author’s preprint),1 so I’d like to take this chance to share the back-story and highlight my own view on some of our findings, and the associated package on CRAN.2 I didn’t set out to write this paper.  I ... [Read more...]

My treebase package is now up on the CRAN repository. (Source code is up, the binaries should appear soon). Here’s a few introductory examples to illustrate some of the functionality of the package. Thanks in part to new data deposition requirements at journals such as Evolution, Am Nat, and ... [Read more...]

While high-speed fish feeding videos may be the signature of the lab, dig a bit deeper and you’ll find a wealth of comparative phylogenetic methods sneaking in.  It’s a natural union — expert functional morphology is the key to good comparative methods, just as phylogenies hold the key to ... [Read more...]

My TreeBASE R package is essentially functional now.  Here’s a quick tutorial on the kinds of things it can do.  Grab the treebase package here, install and load the library into R. TreeBASE provides two APIs to query the database, one which searches by the metadata associated with different ... [Read more...]

I’ve created an R package that uses social media tools for reproducible research.  The goal of the package is this: whenever I run a code, output figures are automatically added to my figure repository (Flickr), linked to the timestamped version of the code that produced them in the code ... [Read more...]