Part of the reason R has become so popular is the vast array of packages available at the cran and bioconductor repositories. In the last few years, the number of packages has grown exponentially! This is a short post giving steps on how to actually install R packages. Let’s suppose you want to install the 
Having always appreciated the red and blue cartograms and cartographs of geographic electoral preferences, such as those made available by Mark Newman, I sought to produce similar maps, but include information about support for non-”state-sponsored” parties, and to extend the coverage back in time. I was able to find county-level presidential election returns going as … Read more
Forest plots are most commonly used in reporting meta-analyses, but can be profitably used to summarise the results of a fitted model. They essentially display the estimates for model parameters and their corresponding confidence intervals. Matt Shotwell just posted a message to the R-help mailing list with his lattice-based solution to the problem of creating forest plots in R. I 
I decided to go use ggplot2 more frequently and go through everything. For future reference I will start a series of blog posts on ggplot2. Scatter plot: In my next post, I will change the axis labels.
I’m in the process of buying a used car. Since I enjoy making these decisions as complicated as possible, I’ve written some R code to scrape relevant websites for informative data. I’ve written this up as a blog entry because I think it’s a decent example of how one might use the XML...
…was the tongue-in-cheek title of an image that I posted to Twitpic this week. It shows the usage of the word “novel” in PubMed article titles over time. As someone correctly pointed out at FriendFeed, it needs to be corrected for total publications per year. It was inspired by a couple of items that caught 
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 part of most scientific talks, and since that’s 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
