Which topics are the most popular at the BioStar bioinformatics Q&A site? One source of data is the tags used for questions. Tags are somewhat arbitrary of course, but fortunately BioStar has quite an active community, so “bad” tags are usually edited to improve them. Hint: if your question ... [Read more...]

Peter writes: I wonder if part of the drop off is live bloggers moving to platforms like Twitter? I can tell you it seemed like there were almost as many tweets for one SIG (#bosc2011) as for the whole of #ISMB / #ECCB2011, and I personally didn’t post anything to ... [Read more...]

I was reading an old post that describes GEOmetadb, a downloadable database containing metadata from the GEO database. We had a brief discussion in the comments about the growth in GSE records (user-submitted) versus GDS records (curated datasets) over time. Below, some quick and dirty R code to examine the ... [Read more...]

Visit this URL and you’ll find a perfectly-formatted CSV file containing information about recent earthquakes. A nice feature of R is the ability to slurp such a URL straight into a data frame: quakes [Read more...]

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I’m looking at ways to provide access to R via a web application. First rule: see what’s available first, before you reinvent the wheel. It’s not pretty. From the R Web Interfaces FAQ: Software Brief notes Rweb Page last updated 1999. Of the 3 example links on the page ... [Read more...]

It’s been ages since I visited the R website, so I don’t know how long they’ve had a wiki. It’s built using DokuWiki, one of my personal favourites. This is a great leap forward for R documentation, which is somewhat notorious for being (a) difficult to ... [Read more...]