Back in February, I wrote some R code to analyse tweets covering the 2017 Lorne Genome conference. It worked pretty well. So I reused the code for two recent bioinformatics meetings held in Sydney: the Sydney Bioinformatics Research Symposium and the VIZBI 2017 meeting. So without further ado, here are the reports ...

Just pushed an updated version of my nhmrcData R package to Github. A quick summary of the changes: In response to feedback, added the packages required for vignette building as dependencies (Imports) – commit Added 8 new datasets with funding outcomes by gender for 2003 – 2013, created from a spreadsheet that I missed first … ...

Do you like R? Information about Australian biomedical research funding outcomes? Tidy data? If the answers to those questions are “yes”, then you may also like nhmrcData, a collection of datasets derived from funding statistics provided by the Australian National Health & Medical Research Council. It’s also my first R ...

Short version: if RStudio on Windows 7 crashes when viewing vignettes in HTML format, it may be because those packages specify knitr::rmarkdown as the vignette engine, instead of knitr::knitr and you’re using rmarkdown v1. Longer version with details – read on. update: looks like this issue relates to the ...

Things to know about Lorne in the state of Victoria, Australia. It’s situated on the Great Ocean Road, a major visitor attraction and a great way to see the scenic coastline of the region It’s home to a number of life science conferences including Lorne Genome 2017 This week’...

Dual y-axes: yes or no? What about if one of them is also reversed, i.e. values increase from the top of the chart to the bottom? Judging by this StackOverflow question, hydrologists are fond of both of these things. It asks whether ggplot2 can be used to generate a “...

Yes, it started with a tweet: Nice graphic on urine components via https://t.co/sfuXNB02sF pic.twitter.com/vhVLahQ8su — Metabolomics (@metabolomics) January 31, 2017 By what measure is this a “nice graphic”? First, the JPEG itself is low-quality. Second, it contains spelling and numerical errors (more on that later). ...

Like many data nerds, I’m a big fan of Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations, a humourous illustration of the old adage “correlation does not equal causation”. Technically, I suppose it should be called “spurious interpretations” since the correlations themselves are quite real, but then good marketing is everything. There ...

So the votes are in: Your established blog is mostly about your work. Your work changes. Do you continue at the current blog or start a new one? — Neil Saunders (@neilfws) January 23, 2017 I thank you, kind readers. So here’s the plan: (1) keep blogging here as frequently as possible (perhaps ...

I missed it first time around but apparently, back in October, Nature published a somewhat-controversial article: Evidence for a limit to human lifespan. It came to my attention in a recent tweet: Just wow https://t.co/fupXIOAC43 pic.twitter.com/vsxT3VyTg6 — Nick Loman (@pathogenomenick) December 11, 2016 The source: a ...

I recently saw a tweet floating by which included a link to some recent statistics from PubMed Commons, the NCBI service for commenting on scientific articles in PubMed. Perhaps it was this post at their blog. So I thought now would be a good time to write some code to ...

Using R to add data to maps has been pretty straightforward for a few years now. That said, it seems easier than ever to do things like use map APIs (e.g. Google, Open Street Map), overlay quite complex data visualisations (e.g. “heatmap-style” densities) and even generate animations. A ...

I don’t “do politics” at this blog, but I’m always happy to do charts. Here’s one that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter recently: A quick look at turnout data: It seems 2016 was nothing special for the Rep-candidate. It's the Dem-candidate that didn't get the vote ...

A recent tweet: @neilfws I enjoyed this: https://t.co/ynyHRbgpLN Have you published (or are you thinking about publishing) this analysis anywhere? — Marcus Munafo (@MarcusMunafo) October 7, 2015 made me think (1) has it really been 5 years, (2) gee, my ggplot skills were dreadful back then and (3) did I really not know how ...

The Nobel Prizes. Love them? Hate them? Are they still relevant, meaningful? Go on admit it, you always imagined you would win one day. Whatever you think of them, the 2015 results are in. What’s more, the good people of the Nobel Foundation offer us free access to data via ...

About a year ago, I did a little work on a very interesting project which was trying to identify blood-based biomarkers for the early detection of stroke. The data included gene expression measurements using microarrays at various time points after the onset of ischemia (reduced blood supply). I had not ...

Last week, I was listening to episode 337 of the podcast This Week in Virology. It concerned a retrovirus-like sequence element named Steamer, which is associated with a transmissible leukaemia in soft shell clams. At one point the host and guests discussed the idea of searching for Steamer-like sequences in the ...