Articles by nsaunders

Gene names, data corruption and Excel: a 2021 update

August 3, 2021 | nsaunders

It’s an old favourite of this blog, isn’t it. We had Gene name errors and Excel: lessons not learned (2012). Followed by Data corruption using Excel: 12+ years and counting (2016). Perhaps most depressingly of all, the conclusion of the trilogy, When your tools are broken, just change the data (2019-20). ... [Read more...]

Debuting in a VFL/AFL Grand Final is rare

September 26, 2019 | nsaunders

When Marlion Pickett runs onto the M.C.G for Richmond in the AFL Grand Final this Saturday, he’ll be only the sixth player in 124 finals to debut on the big day. The sole purpose of this blog post is to illustrate how incredibly easy it is to figure ... [Read more...]

Extracting Sydney transport data from Twitter

September 10, 2019 | nsaunders

The @sydstats Twitter account uses this code base, and data from the Transport for NSW Open Data API to publish insights into delays on the Sydney Trains network. Each tweet takes one of two forms and is consistently formatted, making it easy to parse and extract information. Here are a ...
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Twitter coverage of the useR! 2019 conference

July 15, 2019 | nsaunders

Very briefly: Last week was useR! conference time again, coming to you this time from Toulouse, France I’ve retrieved 8 318 tweets that mention #user2019 and run them through my report generator And here are the results Take-home message this year: the R Ladies rock!
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Geelong and the curse of the bye

June 25, 2019 | nsaunders

This week we return to Australian Rules Football, the R package fitzRoy and some statistics to ask – why can’t Geelong win after a bye? (with apologies to long-time readers who used to come for the science) Code and a report for this blog post are available at Github. First, ...
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Mapping the Vikings using R

April 3, 2019 | nsaunders

The commute to my workplace is 90 minutes each way. Podcasts are my friend. I’m a long-time listener of In Our Time and enjoyed the recent episode about The Danelaw. Melvyn and I hail from the same part of the world, and I learned as a child that many of ...
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This is not normal(ised)

March 11, 2019 | nsaunders

“Sydney stations where commuters fall through gaps, get stuck in lifts” blares the headline. The story tells us that: Central Station, the city’s busiest, topped the list last year with about 54 people falling through gaps Wow! Wait a minute… Central Station, the city’s busiest Some poking around in ...
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Using parameters in Rmarkdown

March 4, 2019 | nsaunders

Nothing new or original here, just something that I learned about quite recently that may be useful for others. One of my more “popular” code repositories, judging by Twitter, is – well, Twitter. It mostly contains Rmarkdown reports which summarise meetings and conferences by analysing usage of their associated Twitter hashtags. ... [Read more...]

Price’s Protein Puzzle: 2019 update

January 30, 2019 | nsaunders

Chains of amino acids strung together make up proteins and since each amino acid has a 1-letter abbreviation, we can find words (English and otherwise) in protein sequences. I imagine this pursuit began as soon as proteins were first sequenced, but the first reference to protein word-finding as a sport ... [Read more...]

Just use a scatterplot. Also, Sydney sprawls.

July 17, 2018 | nsaunders

Sydney’s congestion at ‘tipping point’ blares the headline and to illustrate, an interactive chart with bars for city population densities, points for commute times and of course, dual-axes. Yuck. OK, I guess it does show that Sydney is one of three cities that are low density, but have comparable ...
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Using leaflet, just because

July 17, 2018 | nsaunders

I love it when researchers take the time to share their knowledge of the computational tools that they use. So first, let me point you at Environmental Computing, a site run by environmental scientists at the University of New South Wales, which has a good selection of R programming tutorials. ...
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Twitter coverage of the useR! 2018 conference

July 16, 2018 | nsaunders

In summary: useR! the conference for users of R was held in Brisbane earlier this month it sounded like a lot of fun and here’s an analysis of tweets that used the #useR2018 hashtag during the week The code that generated the report (which I’ve used heavily and ...
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