“There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random.” —Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls Why R? R is a powerful programming language a...

Initial considerations A disadvantage of choropleth maps is that they tend to distort the relationship between the true underlying geography and the represented variable. It is because the administrative divisions do not usually coincide with the ...

One of my guilty pleasure TV shows is MTV’s The Challenge. Debuting in the late 90s, the show pitted alumni from The Real World and Road Rules against each other in a series of physical events. Now on its 36th season, its found new popularity by importing challengers from ...

I made another small update to my SARS-CoV-2 Shiny App. As the discussion in Germany about whether to open schools and shops starts again I was wondering how I could visualize a simple prediction of future infections. So I did the following simple appr...

I am an applied economist and economists love Stata. Every time I work with somebody who uses Stata on panel models with fixed effects and clustered standard errors I am mildly confused by Stata’s ‘reghdfe’ function producing standard errors that...

The scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been astounding. Aside from efforts to generate vaccines, the genomic surveillance of the virus has been truly remarkable. For example, the nextstrain project has sequence many SARS-CoV-2 genomes. In fact, the rapid identification of multiple new strains and mutations by diverse groups ...

Data Carpentries builds communities to teach data literacy, primarily for masters and doctoral researchers, but the skills taught are applicable in a wide variety of areas. The social science curriculum uses the SAFI (Studying African Farmer-Led Irrig...

Data Carpentries builds communities to teach data literacy, primarily for masters and doctoral researchers, but the skills taught are applicable in a wide variety of areas. The social science curriculum uses the SAFI (Studying African Farmer-Led Irrig...

Last week I spend a few hours figuring out how to auto deploy a shiny app on 2 apps on shinyapps.io from github. You can see the result on this github repository. This github repository is connected to two shiny apps on shinyapps.io. Here is what I en...

Value the users of your Shiny App: Do not overlook the power of a professional UI. You can have an amazing analysis behind the scenes, but if you don’t have an intuitive and appealing User Interface, your users might not interact with it properly. ...