Category: rblogs

Old dog and the tidyverse

Trees in a carpark (Photo: Luis, click to enlarge).

I started using R ages ago and have happily lived in mostly-base-R for data manipulation. Once in a while I move to something that makes a big difference, like ggplot2 in 2010 or Rmarkdown in 2015, but the set of packages I use for data + plotting hasn't seen many changes. I have to confess… Continue reading Old dog and the tidyverse

Cute Gibbs sampling for rounded observations

I was attending a course of Bayesian Statistics where this problem showed up: There is a number of individuals, say 12, who take a pass/fail test 15 times. For each individual we have recorded the number of passes, which can go from 0 to 15. Because of confidentiality issues, we are presented with rounded-to-the-closest-multiple-of-3 data… Continue reading Cute Gibbs sampling for rounded observations

Mucking around with maps, schools and ethnicity in NZ

I've been having a conversation for a while with @kamal_hothi and @aschiff on maps, schools, census, making NZ data available, etc. This post documents some basic steps I used for creating a map on ethnic diversity in schools at the census-area-unit level. This "el quicko" version requires 3 ingredients: Census area units shape files (available… Continue reading Mucking around with maps, schools and ethnicity in NZ

Comment on Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest

After writing a blog post about the paper "Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest" I decided to submit a formal comment to the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability in July 2013, which was published today. As far as I know, Heinemann et al. provided a rebuttal to my comments, which… Continue reading Comment on Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest