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Our Community Call on Tuesday, March 7th, 8-9 AM PST, will cover “How to ask questions so they get answered! Possibly by yourself!”. Asking questions about programming is a skill you can develop - we’re not just born with it. The speakers will cover some of the background and skills you’ll need to increase your chances of having your questions answered by your peers or by a busy expert. Join the Call...
As a lab scientist, I do almost all of my experiments in microtiter plates. These tools are an efficient means of organizing many parallel experimental conditions. It’s not always easy, however, to translate between the physical plate and a useful data structure for analysis. My first attempts to solve this problem–nesting one ifelse call inside of the next to describe which well was which–were very unsatisfying. Over time, my attempts at solving the problem grew more sophisticated, and eventually, the plater package was born....
For a fourth year running, we are excited to announce the rOpenSci unconference, our annual event loosely modeled on Foo Camp. We’re organizing #runconf17 to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profits to get together for a couple of days to hack on various projects and generally enrich our community. The agenda is mostly decided during the unconference itself. Past projects have related to open data, data visualization, data publication and open science using R....
Programmatic access to biodiversity data is revolutionising large-scale, reproducible biodiversity research. In the marine realm, the largest global database of species occurrence records is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS. As of January 2017, OBIS contains 47.78 million occurrences of 117,345 species, all openly available and accessible via the OBIS API. The number of questions to address using these kinds of resources is as large as the number of investigators, but certain operations commonly crop up in many workflows....
This week an update for xml2 and a new xslt package have appeared on CRAN. A full announcement for xml2 version 1.1 will appear on the rstudio blog. This post explains xml validation (via xsd schema) and xml transformation (via xslt stylesheets) which have been added in this release. XML schemas and stylesheets are not exactly new; both xslt 1.1 (2001) and xsd 1.0 (2004) have been available in browsers for over a decade....
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