Articles by nsaunders

Data discovery: seasonal speed

January 22, 2024 | nsaunders

Just writing this one quickly as it’s been hanging around my browser tabs for weeks… I wrote Taking steps (in XML) almost 7 years ago and once in a while, I still grab Apple Health data from my phone and play around with it in R for a few minutes. ...

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Price’s Protein Puzzle: 2023 update

July 26, 2023 | nsaunders

One of the joys (?) of having been online for…quite some time now…is watching topics reappear every few years or so. So what’s new? In terms of English word matches: not much. Some new proteins but no new 9-letter words. The Twitter thread, above, contains an interesting reply ... [Read more...]

The “curse of the bye” revisited

July 10, 2023 | nsaunders

A while ago we looked at Geelong and the curse of the bye. And since the AFL media have outdone themselves this year with “curse of the bye” articles: see for example here, here, here and here, I decided to revisit the topic in more depth. If you like that ...

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Has your knowledge stopped updating?

January 27, 2023 | nsaunders

Some years ago I read an article – I forget where – describing how our general knowledge often becomes frozen in time. Asked to name the tallest building in the world you confidently proclaim “the Sears Tower!”, because for most of your childhood that was the case – never mind that the record ... [Read more...]

Editing metadata in trail camera images using R, magick and exiftool

October 25, 2022 | nsaunders

I have a new hobby: camera traps, also known as trail cameras. Strapped to trees in my local bushland they sit in wait, firing automatically when triggered by a passing animal. Once in a while, something quite magical happens. The camera model I chose is the Campark T85 which for ...

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Using R to detect the pressure wave from the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption in personal weather station data

March 29, 2022 | nsaunders

It seems like an age ago, but in fact it was only mid-January 2022 when this happened: The answers are yes and yes again. One excellent source of weather station data is the Weather Underground. They used to have an API which could be accessed through an R package, rwunderground. This ...

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Using R/fitzRoy to ask: how many times a V/AFL team with the same lineup has played together?

March 27, 2022 | nsaunders

If you sit in the intersection of “likes Australian Rules football / finds sport statistics interesting / is on Twitter”, you’ve probably come across Swamp. One of his recent tweets tells us that: The answer to that question is at once surprising, less surprising when you think about it, and quite ... [Read more...]

Gene names, data corruption and Excel: a 2021 update

August 3, 2021 | nsaunders

It’s an old favourite of this blog, isn’t it. We had Gene name errors and Excel: lessons not learned (2012). Followed by Data corruption using Excel: 12+ years and counting (2016). Perhaps most depressingly of all, the conclusion of the trilogy, When your tools are broken, just change the data (2019-20). ... [Read more...]

How I resurrected my ancient PhD thesis using R/bookdown (and some other tools)

July 22, 2021 | nsaunders

I’ve long admired the look of publications generated using the R bookdown package, and thought it would be fun and educational to publish one myself. The problem is that I am not writing a book and have no plans to do so any time soon. Then I remembered that ... [Read more...]

Florence Nightingale’s “rose charts” (and others) in ggplot2

March 16, 2021 | nsaunders

It’s been a while. I hope you are all well. Shall we make some charts? About this time last year, one of my life-long dreams came true when I was told that I could work from home indefinitely. One effect of this – I won’t say downside – is that ...

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Debuting in a VFL/AFL Grand Final is rare

September 26, 2019 | nsaunders

When Marlion Pickett runs onto the M.C.G for Richmond in the AFL Grand Final this Saturday, he’ll be only the sixth player in 124 finals to debut on the big day. The sole purpose of this blog post is to illustrate how incredibly easy it is to figure ... [Read more...]

Extracting Sydney transport data from Twitter

September 10, 2019 | nsaunders

The @sydstats Twitter account uses this code base, and data from the Transport for NSW Open Data API to publish insights into delays on the Sydney Trains network. Each tweet takes one of two forms and is consistently formatted, making it easy to parse and extract information. Here are a ...

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Twitter coverage of the useR! 2019 conference

July 15, 2019 | nsaunders

Very briefly: Last week was useR! conference time again, coming to you this time from Toulouse, France I’ve retrieved 8 318 tweets that mention #user2019 and run them through my report generator And here are the results Take-home message this year: the R Ladies rock!

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Can random forest provide insights into how yeast grows?

June 26, 2019 | nsaunders

I’m not saying this is a good idea, but bear with me. A recent question on Stack Overflow [r] asked why a random forest model was not working as expected. The questioner was working with data from an experiment in which yeast was grown under conditions where (a) the ...

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Geelong and the curse of the bye

June 25, 2019 | nsaunders

This week we return to Australian Rules Football, the R package fitzRoy and some statistics to ask – why can’t Geelong win after a bye? (with apologies to long-time readers who used to come for the science) Code and a report for this blog post are available at Github. First, ...

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Mapping the Vikings using R

April 3, 2019 | nsaunders

The commute to my workplace is 90 minutes each way. Podcasts are my friend. I’m a long-time listener of In Our Time and enjoyed the recent episode about The Danelaw. Melvyn and I hail from the same part of the world, and I learned as a child that many of ...

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How long since your team scored 100+ points? This blog’s first foray into the fitzRoy R package

March 21, 2019 | nsaunders

When this blog moved from bioinformatics to data science I ran a Twitter poll to ask whether I should start afresh at a new site or continue here. “Continue here”, you said. So let’s test the tolerance of the long-time audience and celebrate the start of the 2019 season as ...

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This is not normal(ised)

March 11, 2019 | nsaunders

“Sydney stations where commuters fall through gaps, get stuck in lifts” blares the headline. The story tells us that: Central Station, the city’s busiest, topped the list last year with about 54 people falling through gaps Wow! Wait a minute… Central Station, the city’s busiest Some poking around in ...

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Using parameters in Rmarkdown

March 4, 2019 | nsaunders

Nothing new or original here, just something that I learned about quite recently that may be useful for others. One of my more “popular” code repositories, judging by Twitter, is – well, Twitter. It mostly contains Rmarkdown reports which summarise meetings and conferences by analysing usage of their associated Twitter hashtags. ... [Read more...]

An absolute beginner’s guide to creating data frames for a Stack Overflow [r] question

February 7, 2019 | nsaunders

For better or worse I spend some time each day at Stack Overflow [r], reading and answering questions. If you do the same, you probably notice certain features in questions that recur frequently. It’s as though everyone is copying from one source – perhaps the one at the top of ... [Read more...]

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Articles by nsaunders

Data discovery: seasonal speed

Price’s Protein Puzzle: 2023 update

The “curse of the bye” revisited

Has your knowledge stopped updating?

Editing metadata in trail camera images using R, magick and exiftool

Using R to detect the pressure wave from the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption in personal weather station data

Using R/fitzRoy to ask: how many times a V/AFL team with the same lineup has played together?

Gene names, data corruption and Excel: a 2021 update

How I resurrected my ancient PhD thesis using R/bookdown (and some other tools)

Florence Nightingale’s “rose charts” (and others) in ggplot2

Debuting in a VFL/AFL Grand Final is rare

Extracting Sydney transport data from Twitter

Twitter coverage of the useR! 2019 conference

Can random forest provide insights into how yeast grows?

Geelong and the curse of the bye

Mapping the Vikings using R

How long since your team scored 100+ points? This blog’s first foray into the fitzRoy R package

This is not normal(ised)

Using parameters in Rmarkdown

An absolute beginner’s guide to creating data frames for a Stack Overflow [r] question

Articles by nsaunders

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