The other night in my office I got into a discussion with my office mate, the brilliant scientist / amazing skier Dr. Thor Veen about how to understand the random effect variance term in a mixed-effects model. Thor teaches the R statistics course here at UBC, and last night a student ... [Read more...]

Recently we at rOpenSci released our rfigshare package up on cran (or you can check out the most up to date version on github. So what’s so great about being able to create figshare articles through R? For some time now I’ve been advocating the use of a ... [Read more...]

I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally finished my rGtrends package, an interface for the unofficial python Google trends API. It’s a simple function that will allow you to search Google Trends from within R. I haven’t really come up with how this is really relevant ... [Read more...]

Have you ever wanted an easy way to generate continuous color pallettes for a discrete factor? I came across a question over on Stackoverflow about how add color to a ggplot figure. I often find myself with lot’s of categories that are discrete when I want a continuous color ... [Read more...]

There’s a great Tom Waits song from the album “Mule Variations” called “Big in Japan”. The beauty of saying you’re big in Japan is that no one can ever really verify the statement (or at least that was more true in 1999). You might assert “my work is big ... [Read more...]

Remember 1992? I had just turned 13 and was still a year away from highschool when my true descent into nerdom and the internet would begin. Back then it was with a local BBS (Bulletin Board System) run by a guy in a trailer park named Charlie and a 1200 baud modem on ... [Read more...]

Le Grand Casino of Monte CarloOn Monday I’m going to be leading a little stats workshop on randomization tests and null models. In preparation for this I wrote up code for null model examples I wanted to write a post that introduced the basics of these models (Null models, ... [Read more...]

A simple foodwebOne of my interests is in food web topology and food web dynamics. My research in experimental ponds has left me with 2430 food webs to make sense of, and one way to facilitate understanding that many networks, and really any food web, is through visualization. There are fancy ... [Read more...]

So in prepping for my latest manuscript on population dynamics I have been creating all the necessary figures.  One of them I considered was a 2-d surface plot of a modified Ricker equation showing the transitions from extinction stability, and stability to limit cycles.  Inconveniently though the only way to ... [Read more...]

So I took a brief break from ecology yesterday to pursue another project, modeling the NCAA bracket. I decided to run a stochastic simulation of the tournament. I know this has nothing to do with ecology, but I believe its a good exercise in modeling. Modeling has very little to ... [Read more...]