Working together to push science forward
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Educators who teach science using R tend to face common pedagogical problems, regardless of their scientific domain. Yet instructors who teach with R often feel isolated at their institutions. They may be the only ones in their departments to teach using R. Even if there are others, the culture of collaboration around teaching is generally impoverished, unlike the rich culture of collaboration around research. In this three-part series of blog posts, participants at the rOpenSci 2018 unconf briefly survey the state of teaching science with R....
The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. 🔗 What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF images with thousands of colors per frame and do so much faster than other software....
R packages are widely used in science, yet the code behind them often does not come under scrutiny. To address this lack, rOpenSci has been a pioneer in developing a peer review process for R packages. The goal of pkginspector is to help that process by providing a means to better understand the internal structure of R packages. It offers tools to analyze and visualize the relationship among functions within a package, and to report whether or not functions' interfaces are consistent....
Evolutionary biologists are increasingly using R for building, editing and visualizing phylogenetic trees. The reproducible code-based workflow and comprehensive array of tools available in packages such as ape, phangorn and phytools make R an ideal platform for phylogenetic analysis. Yet the many different tree formats are not well integrated, as pointed out in a recent post. The standard data structure for phylogenies in R is the “phylo” object, a memory efficient, matrix-based tree representation....
It’s easy to come to a conference and feel intimidated by the wealth of knowledge and expertise of other attendees. As Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and writer describes, I was aware at all times that I had only islands of knowledge separated by darkness; that I was surrounded by chasms of not-knowing, into one of which I was certain to fall. Ellen Ullman in Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology....
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