This is another of those confluence style posts, where a handful of things I’ve read in quick succession seem to phase lock in my mind: (brought to mind in part via @downes a week or so ago: How to Synch 32 Metronomes) The first was a post by Alan Levine on Making Text Work, which 
One of the possible barriers to widespread adoption of open notebook science is knowing where to start. Video reports of lab experiments hosted on Youtube can be easily embedded in a hosted WordPress blog; a MediaWiki wiki can be used to provide one page per experiment, with change tracking/history on each page and a shadow 
It’s all very well publishing a research paper that describes the method for, and results of, analysing a dataset in a particular way, or a news story that contains a visualisation of an open dataset, but how can you do so transparently and reproducibly? Wouldn’t it be handy if you could “View Source” on the 
One of the great things about (software) code is that people build on it and out from it… Which means that as well as producing ever more complex bits of software, tools also get produced over time that make it easier to do things that were once hard to do, or required expensive commercial software 
Earlier today, I saw a post vis the aggregating R-Bloggers service a post on Using Text Mining to Find Out What @RDataMining Tweets are About. The post provides a walktrhough of how to grab tweets into an R session using the twitteR library, and then do some text mining on it. I’ve been meaning to 
Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe a quick way of analysing 
How many different dimensions (or “columns” in a dataset where each row represents a different sample and each column a different measurement taken as part of that sample) can you plot on a chart? Two are obvious: X and Y values, which are ideal for representing continuous numerical variables. If you’re plotting points, as in 
Another way for the database challenged (such as myself!) for merging two datasets that share at least one common column… This recipe using the cross-platform stats analysis package, R. I use R via the R-Studio client, which provides an IDE wrapper around the R environment. So for example, here’s how to merge a couple of 
Last week I attended the OU Statistics conference on Visualisation and Presentation in Statistics (VIPS) (notes: here and here) One of the things that struck me from conversations and some of the presentations was that statistics – and in particular public engagement around statistics – appears to be lagging science efforts in this area. When 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
