Posted by nsaunders

Years as coloured bars

I keep seeing years represented by coloured bars. First it was that demographic tsunami chart. Then there are examples like the one on the right, which came up in a web search today. I even saw one (whispers) at work today. I get what they are trying to do – illustrate trends within … Continue reading →

Twitter Coverage of the ISMB/ECCB Conference 2017

Search all the hashtags ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology – which sounds rather old-fashioned now, doesn’t it?) is the largest conference for bioinformatics and computational biology. It is held annually and, when in Europe, jointly with the European Conference on … Continue reading →

Twitter Coverage of the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2017

July 21-22 saw the 18th incarnation of the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, which generally precedes the ISMB meeting. I had the great pleasure of attending BOSC way back in 2003 and delivering a short presentation on Bioperl. I knew almost nothing in those days, but everyone was very kind … Continue reading →

Hacking Highcharter: observations per group in boxplots

Highcharts has long been a favourite visualisation library of mine, and I’ve written before about Highcharter, my preferred way to use Highcharts in R. Highcharter has a nice simple function, hcboxplot(), to generate boxplots. I recently generated some for a project at work and was asked: can … Continue reading →

Chart golf: the “demographic tsunami”

“‘Demographic tsunami’ will keep Sydney, Melbourne property prices high” screams the headline. While the census showed Australia overall is aging, there’s been a noticeable lift in the number of people aged between 25 to 32. As the accompanying graph … Continue reading →

Visualising Twitter coverage of recent bioinformatics conferences

Back in February, I wrote some R code to analyse tweets covering the 2017 Lorne Genome conference. It worked pretty well. So I reused the code for two recent bioinformatics meetings held in Sydney: the Sydney Bioinformatics Research Symposium and the VIZBI 2017 meeting. So without further ado, here … Continue reading →

An update to the nhmrcData R package

Just pushed an updated version of my nhmrcData R package to Github. A quick summary of the changes: In response to feedback, added the packages required for vignette building as dependencies (Imports) – commit Added 8 new datasets with funding outcomes by gender for 2003 – 2013, … Continue reading →

The nhmrcData package: NHMRC funding outcomes data made tidy

Do you like R? Information about Australian biomedical research funding outcomes? Tidy data? If the answers to those questions are “yes”, then you may also like nhmrcData, a collection of datasets derived from funding statistics provided by the Australian National Health & Medical … Continue reading →

HTML vignettes crashing your RStudio? This may be the reason

Short version: if RStudio on Windows 7 crashes when viewing vignettes in HTML format, it may be because those packages specify knitr::rmarkdown as the vignette engine, instead of knitr::knitr and you’re using rmarkdown v1. Longer version with details – read on. update: looks like this … Continue reading →

Twitter Coverage of the Lorne Genome Conference 2017

Things to know about Lorne in the state of Victoria, Australia. It’s situated on the Great Ocean Road, a major visitor attraction and a great way to see the scenic coastline of the region It’s home to a number of life science conferences including Lorne Genome 2017 This week’s … Continue reading →

Hyetographs, hydrographs and highcharter

Dual y-axes: yes or no? What about if one of them is also reversed, i.e. values increase from the top of the chart to the bottom? Judging by this StackOverflow question, hydrologists are fond of both of these things. It asks whether ggplot2 can be used to generate a “rainfall hyetograph and … Continue reading →

Nice graphic? Are they taking the p…

Yes, it started with a tweet: Nice graphic on urine components via https://t.co/sfuXNB02sF pic.twitter.com/vhVLahQ8su — Metabolomics (@metabolomics) January 31, 2017 By what measure is this a “nice graphic”? First, the JPEG itself is low-quality. Second, it contains spelling … Continue reading →

The real meaning of spurious correlations

Like many data nerds, I’m a big fan of Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations, a humourous illustration of the old adage “correlation does not equal causation”. Technically, I suppose it should be called “spurious interpretations” since the correlations themselves are … Continue reading →

Taking steps (in XML)

So the votes are in: Your established blog is mostly about your work. Your work changes. Do you continue at the current blog or start a new one? — Neil Saunders (@neilfws) January 23, 2017 I thank you, kind readers. So here’s the plan: (1) keep blogging here as frequently as possible … Continue reading →

Evidence for a limit to effective peer review

I missed it first time around but apparently, back in October, Nature published a somewhat-controversial article: Evidence for a limit to human lifespan. It came to my attention in a recent tweet: Just wow https://t.co/fupXIOAC43 pic.twitter.com/vsxT3VyTg6 — Nick Loman (@pathogenomenick) … Continue reading →