Version 0.2.0 of the packcircles package has just been published on CRAN. This package provides functions to find non-overlapping arrangements of circles in bounded and unbounded areas. The package how has a new circleProgressiveLayout function. It uses an efficient deterministic algorithm to arrange circles by consecutively placing each one externally tangent ...

This is another article on the theme of defining groups in a hierarchical classification. A previous article described homogeneity analysis to visualize how any well any number of groups, defined at the same level accounts for the variability in the da...

The proto package is my latest favourite R goodie. It brings prototype-based programming to the R language - a style of programming that lets you do many of the things you can do with classes, but with a lot less up-front work. Louis Kates and Thomas P...

I've spent more years than I care to remember analysing vegetation survey data (typically species abundances in plots) using a variety of software including my own algorithms coded in FORTRAN and C++. A recent query on the r-help list, about how to det...

My colleague Karen needed an equation to predict trunk diameter given tree height, which she hoped to base on measurements of trees in semi-arid Australian woodlands. This is the dark art of allometry and a quick google found a large number of formulae...

To visualize the results of a simulation model of woodland trees within R, I needed an algorithm that could arrange a large number of circles within a rectangle such that no two circles overlapped by more than a specified amount. A colleague had approa...