[This article was first published on R on Chemometrics & Spectroscopy using R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

ChemoSpecUtils, a package that supports the common needs of ChemoSpec and ChemoSpec2D, has been updated to fix an unfortunate distance calculation error in version 0.4.38, released in January of this year. From the NEWS file for version 0.4.51:

• Function rowDist, which supports a number of functions, was overhauled to address confusion in the documentation, and in my head, about distances vs. similarities. Also, different definitions found in the literature were documented more clearly. The Minkowski distance option was removed (ask if you want it back), code was cleaned up, documentation greatly improved, an example was added and unit tests were added. Plot scales were also corrected as necessary. Depending upon which distance option is chosen, this change affects hcaSpectra, plotSpectraDist, sampleDist and hcaScores in package ChemoSpec as well as hats_alignSpectra2D and hcaScores in package ChemoSpec2D.

This brings to mind a Karl Broman quote I think about frequently:

“Open source means everyone can see my stupid mistakes. Version control means everyone can see every stupid mistake I’ve ever made.”

Karl Broman

Karl Broman quote source