Working together to push science forward
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A research project often starts with a bright idea and an initial commitment of volunteer time, or perhaps, a fixed term grant. But what happens after that initial activity? How can the project continue to sustain itself? (We define sustainability as the capacity to endure. Software is sustainable if it will continue to be available in the future, on new platforms, and meeting new needs. [This is from slide 23 of http://www....
Making packages is a great way to organize R code, whether it’s a set of scripts for personal use, a set of functions for internal company use or a lab group, or to distribute your new cool framework foobar to the masses. There’s a number of guides to writing packages, including http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/. As you develop packages there’s a number of issues that don’t often get much air time. I’ll cover some of them here....
A new version of jsonlite package to CRAN. This is a maintenance release with enhancements and bug fixes. A summary of changes in v1.2 from the NEWS file: Add read_json and write_json convenience wrappers, #161 Update modp_numtoa from upstream, fixes a rounding issue in #148. Ensure asJSON.POSIXt does not use sci notation for negative values, #155 Tweak num_to_char to properly print large negative numbers Performance optimization for simplyfing data frames (see below) Use the Github compare page to see the full diff on metacran....
Next week I’ll be in Washington DC to meet my peers in research community management as part of the inaugural class of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program! The program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has a mission to improve community building and collaboration in scientific organizations and research collaborations by providing a year of training and support to a cohort of scientific community managers. The Fellowship will begin in January 2017 when we 17 Fellows gather for a week-long training course with leaders in the field at AAAS headquarters....
finch has just been released to CRAN (binaries should be up soon). finch is a package to parse Darwin Core files. Darwin Core (DwC) is: a body of standards. It includes a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries. The Darwin Core is primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information....
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