Recently, I needed to figure out how many extension cords I was going to need to buy in order to reach parts of my field site. Wandering around in the field with a surveyor's tape was an option, but so was plotting distances on an aerial image I had of... [Read more...]

The Eclipse IDE with StatET plugin, developed by Stephen Wahlbrink, is one of the more (maybe the most) full-featured options for running R. I’ve written about this combination before (previous post), but the highlights include a script editor with syntax highlighting, code completion, an integrated graphics window, an advanced ... [Read more...]

Oregon State University makes a set of ocean productivity data derived from satellite data available for download and use by researchers. The Ocean Productivity website explains the available data and how it was derived. I have put together a few R fun... [Read more...]

Rick Wicklin contacted me with a helpful suggestion for improving the data presentation method outlined in my  previous post on using ggplot2 to visualize some data. In the previous post I had plotted up a highly correlated set of points, showing the correspondence between maximum daily body temperatures of model ... [Read more...]

Here’s a bit of code used to produce one of the figures in my recent paper dealing with modeling rocky intertidal snail body temperatures. This was my first foray into ggplot2, and it only involved a few hours of head-scratching. The plot is a co... [Read more...]

The June 2011 issue of The R Journal contains an article on the R package digitize (link to pdf) by Timothée Poisot. This might prove to be a handy tool if you occasionally find yourself needing to retrieve data points from figures in old articles for... [Read more...]

Upgrading from R-2.12 to R-2.13 was fairly painless, except for one minor hiccup in trying to get the 64-bit version running on my installation of Eclipse + StatET under Windows 7. The setup instructions are almost entirely the same as I have outlined ... [Read more...]

NOAA’s Physical Sciences Division produces a global map of weekly averaged sea surface temperatures, derived from satellite sources. The data can be found at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.html. I’ve put togeth... [Read more...]

If you’re in the market for a very easy-to-setup integrated development environment for R, wander over to RStudio.org. They’ve just released a beta version of their freely-available front end for R that runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OS ... [Read more...]

For some unknown reason, MATLAB codes its date/time values as the number of elapsed days starting from January 1 in the year 0000. R uses the equally arbitrary, but much more widespread POSIX/Unix epoch as a reference for time keeping, so that R’... [Read more...]

Here's some R code that can be used to download archived tide height data from NOAA's CO-OPS OPeNDAP server. The code makes use of RCurl to send a URL query to the server, and then splits apart the resulting data into a data frame. [Read more...]

Get access to a simple object browser in R so that you can see what variables, data frames, model objects and other junk you have in memory currently. If you don't want to install a full-fledged integrated development environment, this option may be fo... [Read more...]

A brief review of Zuur et al.'s book "Mixed Effects Models and Extensions in Ecology with R". [Read more...]

A review of Zuur et al.'s "A Beginner's Guid to R". This book quickly and efficiently introduces you to the peculiarities of the R programming language so that you can soon move on to what you actually want to use R for. [Read more...]

A brief review of R in a Nutshell by Joseph Adler. This book continues to serve as a useful reference that sits on my desk next to my computer, waiting to tell me the name of that command I've just forgotten. [Read more...]

A while back I outlined the setup process for running R under the Eclipse integrated development environment with the help of WalWare.de’s StatET plugin for Eclipse, in Windows 7. This post is an update on that procedure for the newer versions of... [Read more...]

Using Sweave to produce pretty-looking documentation for R is awfully handy. It takes a little tweaking to get set up in Eclipse and StatET though. I followed the information in Jeromy Anglim’s webpage to originally get Sweave set up. The followi... [Read more...]

Using StatET’s code generation templates is handy, but the standard Eclipse variable for ${user} just inserts the currently logged-in user’s account name. If you want a different name to appear when ${user} is called, one method is to alter... [Read more...]

Below is a walk-through of some of the basics of customizing plot in R. These are all based on the graphics package that comes in the base installation of R. Let’s start by making a basic plot in R. In the code snippets below, green text behind a... [Read more...]

How to use Eclipse and StatET to create a handy-dandy development environment for R. Using the Eclipse environment provides a nice colored-syntax script editor, an R console, and an object browser to let you peruse the variables you've put into memory.... [Read more...]