The recent ABC News article Australia’s pollution mapped by postcode reveals nation’s dirty truth is interesting. It contains a searchable table, which is useful if you want to look up your own suburb. However, I was left wanting more: specifically, the raw data and some nice maps. So ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

“Some R functions have an awful lot of arguments”, you think to yourself. “I wonder which has the most?” It’s not an original thought: the same question as applied to the R base package is an exercise in the Functions chapter of the excellent Advanced R. Much of the ...

PubMed Commons, the NCBI’s experiment in comments for PubMed articles, has been discontinued. Thoroughly too, with all traces of it expunged from the NCBI website. Last time I wrote about the service, I concluded “all it needs now is more active users, more comments per user and a real ...

The R language provides many different tools for creating maps and adding data to them. I’ve been using the leaflet package at work recently, so I thought I’d provide a short example here. Whilst searching for some data that might make a nice map, I came across this ...

Sometime in 2009, I began listening to a science podcast titled This Week in Virology, or TWiV for short. I thought it was pretty good and listened regularly up until sometime in 2016, when it seemed that most episodes were approaching two hours in duration. I listen to several podcasts when commuting ...

A reminder that when idle queries pop into your head, the answer can often be found using R + online data. And a brief excursion into accessing the Weather Underground. One interesting aspect of Australian life, even in coastal urban areas like Sydney, is that sometimes it just stops raining. For ...

Infographics. I’ve seen good examples. I’ve seen more bad examples. In general, I prefer a good chart to an infographic. That said, there’s a “genre” of infographic that I do think is useful, which I’ll call “if X were 100 Y”. A good example: if the world ...

I keep seeing years represented by coloured bars. First it was that demographic tsunami chart. Then there are examples like the one on the right, which came up in a web search today. I even saw one (whispers) at work today. I get what they are trying to do – illustrate ...

ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology – which sounds rather old-fashioned now, doesn’t it?) is the largest conference for bioinformatics and computational biology. It is held annually and, when in Europe, jointly with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB). I’ve had the good fortune to attend twice: in ...

July 21-22 saw the 18th incarnation of the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, which generally precedes the ISMB meeting. I had the great pleasure of attending BOSC way back in 2003 and delivering a short presentation on Bioperl. I knew almost nothing in those days, but everyone was very kind and appreciative. ...

Highcharts has long been a favourite visualisation library of mine, and I’ve written before about Highcharter, my preferred way to use Highcharts in R. Highcharter has a nice simple function, hcboxplot(), to generate boxplots. I recently generated some for a project at work and was asked: can we see ...

“‘Demographic tsunami’ will keep Sydney, Melbourne property prices high” screams the headline. While the census showed Australia overall is aging, there’s been a noticeable lift in the number of people aged between 25 to 32. As the accompanying graph shows… Whoa, that is one ugly chart. First thought: let’s not ...