eeptools 0.1 is available now on CRAN! You can install it by simply typing:install.packages('eeptools')in your R console now. The package allows users to play with a number of built in datasets for folks in education beginning to learn R, custom themes... [Read more...]

Working with knitr and markdown is a great way to share quick reports with colleagues, but in cases where IE8 is still the dominant browser, shipping an HTML file with embedded graphics is a non-starter. IE8 does not support the Data URI format used to... [Read more...]

The dissertation process has many steps. The prospectus or proposal is one of the last. Awhile ago I was lucky enough to have my dissertation proposal defense and pass!  My project is seeking to understand the linkage between political activity at... [Read more...]

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The LDS_TOOLS package for R has been replaced by the new eeptools package. I am renaming the package for a number of reasons. First, LDS is a technical industry term in education that stands for Longitudinal Data Systems, which is not commonly known an... [Read more...]

Working on my R bootcamp materials and I thought it would be handy to get the bootcamp computers setup by sourcing an R script that will install all necessary non-core packages in it. The problem? How to deploy this script efficiently. A quick method w... [Read more...]

Messing around with animations, I created this toy example to make a growing outline of a heart in R. I have put it up as a gist on GitHub and embedded it below. It uses the animation and the ggplot2 packages--both of which make it incredibly simple to... [Read more...]

We are getting ready to host an R bootcamp this summer at work and I am looking at building on materials that already exist. I just wanted to list a few here while I figure out the best ways to incorporate them. Video Tutorials:This is a fairly ne... [Read more...]

The Journal of Nature put out an interesting op-ed recently discussing the need to make source code available for scientific articles that require statistical computation to produce their results. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/ful... [Read more...]

I was having a little trouble getting RStudio to process BibTex entries and compile a LaTeX file. Bumping around on the great RStudio help forum, I found this entry, which pointed me in the direction. I needed to set a system environment variable in R ... [Read more...]

I want to test embedding source code in the blog by using the handy Gist tool provided by GitHub. These two R functions are a good opportunity to test out embedding a Gist on the website. These functions allow for threshold testing within a vector in R... [Read more...]

After introducing a colleague to the wonders of Dropbox today (more on that later) I realized that it might be useful to put out a list of software that is of use to graduate students. I often find that many of the software products I find indispensable are virtually unknown ... [Read more...]

The Economist recently ran a fascinating article about the emergence of geographical databases and their uses for presenting and analyzing data.All this has made it much easier to create maps that explain—at a glance—something that might otherwise require pages of tables or verbiage. “A percentage or a ... [Read more...]