The help page to make.names describes how to make a valid variable name in R: A syntactically valid name consists of letters, numbers and the dot or underline characters and starts with a letter or the dot not followed by a number. Names such as ‘”.2way”’ are not valid, ...

Here at the Health and Safety Laboratory* we’re big fans of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models (say that 10 times fast) for predicting concentrations of chemicals around your body based upon an exposure. These models take the form of a big system of ODEs. Because they contain many equations and consequently ...

Last time I talked about adapting graphs for presentations.  This time I’m putting some of the concepts I discussed there into action, with a presentation of Immer’s barley dataset.  This is a classic dataset, originally published in 1934; in 1993 Bill Cleveland mentioned it in his book Visualising Data on ...

I’ve just finished reading slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. It contains lots of advice about how to convey meaning through aesthetics. The book has a general/business presentation focus, but it got me wondering about how to apply the ideas in a scientific context.  Since graphs from a big ...

Recently I had the opportunity to do a job swap with one of the guys in the laboratory here at HSL.  I helped out with the mass-spectrometry and James helped me with the data analysis.  Two very useful things came out of this. Firstly, it’s been very informative to ...

The gWidgets framework is a way of creating graphical user interfaces in a toolkit independent way. That means that you can choose between tcl/tk, Gtk, Java or Qt underneath the bonnet. There's also a web-version based upon RApache and ExtJS. Since the code is the same in each case, ...

Last week I was shown the results of a workplace happiness questionnaire. The plots were ripe for a makeover. Most obviously, the pointless 3D effect needs removing, and the colour scheme is badly chosen.