TL;DR If I raise $100 by August 25ths The Walk to End Alzheimer’s, I will have my beard dyed purple in support of Alzheimer’s awareness.
If you are in another country, donate to your local Alzheimer’s charity and email me with the subject walk so I count it towards my total.
Links:
My donation page (Charity report on Alzheimer’s Association)
Facebook Fundraising Page (if you want to share it!
TL;DR If you like dplyr progress bars, and wished you could use them everywhere, including from within Rmd documents, non-interactive shells, etc, then you should check out knitrProgressBar (cran github).
Why Yet Another Progress Bar?? I didn’t set out to create another progress bar package. But I really liked dplyrs style of progress bar, and how they worked under the hood (thanks to the examples from Bob Rudis).
TL;DR If you include others code in your own R package, list them as contributors with comments about what they contributed, and add a license statement in the file that includes their code.
Motivation I recently created the knitrProgressBar package. It is a really simple package, that takes the dplyr progress bars and makes it possible for them to write progress to a supplied file connection. The dplyr package itself is licensed under MIT, so I felt fine taking the code directly from dplyr itself.
TL;DR If you use the docopt package to create command line R executables that take options, there is something to know about numeric command line options: they should have as.double before using them in your script.
Setup Lets set up a new docopt string, that includes both string and numeric arguments.
" Usage: test_numeric.R [--string=<string_value>] [--numeric=<numeric_value>] test_numeric.R (-h | --help) test_numeric.R Description: Testing how values are passed using docopt.
TL;DR Use a short bash script to do deployment from your own computer directly to your *.github.io domain.
Why? So Yihui recommends using Netlify, or even Travis-CI in the Blogdown book. I wasn’t willing to setup a custom domain yet, and some of my posts involve a lot of personally created packages, etc, that I don’t want to debug installation on Travis. So, I wanted a simple script I could call on my laptop that would copy the /public directory to the repo for my github.
If you are a newcomer to my weblog, you may notice that some posts that are R tutorials generally include the output of Sys.time() at the end. If you look closeley at that time and the Posted on date, you may notice that some posts show disagreement between them. This is because I decided to move all of my old blog posts from blogspot to here, and keep the original posted dates.
Manual Linking? Using blogdown for generating websites and blog-posts from Rmarkdown files with lots of inserted code and figures seems pretty awesome, but sometimes you want to include a figure manually, either because you want to generate something manually and convert it (say for going from SVG of lots of points to hi-res PNG), or because it is a figure from something else (like this figure from wikipedia).
Where to?
TL;DR With the recent charges of sexual harassment against some high-profile individuals, and so many women coming forward with #metoo (and the understanding that this is really something almost all women have faced), I realized that my younger self was #partoftheproblem. I think many other men are part of the problem, even though they might not think so. I didn’t think I was part of the problem either. I hope that other men might read this and critically evaluate if they are #partoftheproblem.
TL;DR Other researchers directly criticized a recent publication of ours in a “research article”. Although they raised valid points, they outright lied about the availability of our results. In addition, they did not provide access to their own results. We have published new work supporting our original results, and a direct rebuttal of their critique in a perspective article. The peer reviewers of their “research article” must have been asleep at the wheel to allow the major point, lack of access to our results, to stand.
TL;DR NIH recently introduced a reproducibility initiative, extending to including the “Authentication of Key Resources” page in grant applications from Jan 25, 2016. Seems to be intended for grants involving biological reagents, but we included it in our recent R03 grant developing new data analysis methods. We believe that this type of thing should become common for all grants, not just those that use biological/chemical resources.
NIH and Reproducibility There has been a lot of things published recently about the reproducibility crisis in science (see refs).