This is another of those confluence style posts, where a handful of things I’ve read in quick succession seem to phase lock in my mind: (brought to mind in part via @downes a week or so ago: How to Synch 32 Metronomes) The first was a post by Alan Levine ... [Read more...]

One of the possible barriers to widespread adoption of open notebook science is knowing where to start. Video reports of lab experiments hosted on Youtube can be easily embedded in a hosted WordPress blog; a MediaWiki wiki can be used to provide one page per experiment, with change tracking/history ... [Read more...]

It’s all very well publishing a research paper that describes the method for, and results of, analysing a dataset in a particular way, or a news story that contains a visualisation of an open dataset, but how can you do so transparently and reproducibly? Wouldn’t it be handy ... [Read more...]

One of the great things about (software) code is that people build on it and out from it… Which means that as well as producing ever more complex bits of software, tools also get produced over time that make it easier to do things that were once hard to do, ... [Read more...]

Earlier today, I saw a post vis the aggregating R-Bloggers service a post on Using Text Mining to Find Out What @RDataMining Tweets are About. The post provides a walktrhough of how to grab tweets into an R session using the twitteR library, and then do some text mining on ... [Read more...]

Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe ... [Read more...]

How many different dimensions (or “columns” in a dataset where each row represents a different sample and each column a different measurement taken as part of that sample) can you plot on a chart? Two are obvious: X and Y values, which are ideal for representing continuous numerical variables. If ... [Read more...]

Another way for the database challenged (such as myself!) for merging two datasets that share at least one common column… This recipe using the cross-platform stats analysis package, R. I use R via the R-Studio client, which provides an IDE wrapper around the R environment. So for example, here’s ... [Read more...]

Last week I attended the OU Statistics conference on Visualisation and Presentation in Statistics (VIPS) (notes: here and here) One of the things that struck me from conversations and some of the presentations was that statistics – and in particular public engagement around statistics – appears to be lagging science efforts in ... [Read more...]