In honour of the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth – and because I was asked to by someone via email – I have now released my digitisation of John Snow’s Cholera data in a few other formats: KML and as Google Fusion Tables. To save you reading my previous blog posts on the subject, I’ll
As you might know from some of my previous posts, I’m a big fan of making my scientific work reproducible. My main reasons for being so keen on this are: 1. Reproducibility is key to science – if it can’t be reproduced then it can not be verified (that is, the experiment can’t be tried again
In 1854 there was a massive cholera outbreak in Soho, London – in three days over 120 people died from the disease. Famously, John Snow plotted the locations of the deaths on a map and found they clustered around a pump in Broad Street – he suggested that the pump be taken out of service
If you are creating maps then for goodness sake Use sensible colours! I was helping some undergraduates with some work the other day, and they decided to use the following colour scheme for representing river depth: Deep water: Red Medium-depth water: Bright green Shallow water: Pink Why did they do this? Well, either they were
When clearing out some of my old programming books the other day I realised how far I’d come with programming over the years, and the number of different technologies that I have used over time. I thought I’d do a little summary post going from first programming experience to now – and it’s amazing what’s
Summary: Very useful for reference while producing graphs, and very comprehensive (including heat-maps, 3D graphs and maps). Reference: Mittal, H. V., 2011, R Graph Cookbook, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 272 pages, Publisher’s Website As a scientist I often need to plot graphs of my data, so I am keen to learn more about how to
Summary: Very comprehensive and very useful, but not good for a beginner. Great book though – definitely has a place on my bookshelf. Reference: Adler, J., 2010, R in a Nutshell, O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 611 pages O’Reilly Link After reviewing a book about R designed for beginners (see my previous post) I thought I’d step
Summary: If you can get past the strange underlying story, then this gives a good introduction to R to someone with no programming experience. However, if you have any experience with other programming languages then another book is likely to be more suitable. Reference: Quick, J. M., Statistical Analysis in R: Beginners Guide, Packt Publishing,
I’ve just gone through a bit of a ‘journey of discovery’ in R while trying to plot a grid of plots for one of the research projects I’m doing. I wanted to write a simple function which could produce this grid of plots from a CSV file, allowing me to easily view the trends of
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
