Publications by Luis
Remembering server installation details
I’ve been moving part of my work to university servers, where I’m just one more peasant user with little privileges. In exchange, I can access the jobs from anywhere and I can access multiple processors if needed. Given that I have a sieve-like memory, where configuration details quickly disappear through many small holes, I’m documenting t...
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Flotsam 11: mostly on books
‘No estaba muerto, andaba the parranda’† as the song says. Although rather than partying it mostly has been reading, taking pictures and trying to learn how to record sounds. Here there are some things I’ve come across lately. I can’t remember if I’ve recommended Matloff’s The Art of R Programming before; if I haven’t, go and read...
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Learning to code in R
It used to be that the one of the first decisions to make when learning to program was between compiled (e.g. C or FORTRAN) and interpreted (e.g. Python) languages. In my opinion these days one would have to be a masochist to learn with a compiled language: the extra compilation time and obscure errors are a killer when learning. Today the decisi...
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Subsetting data
At School we use R across many courses, because students are supposed to use statistics under a variety of contexts. Imagine their disappointment when they pass stats and discovered that R and statistics haven’t gone away! When students start working with real data sets one of their first stumbling blocks is subsetting data. We have data sets ...
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Analyzing a simple experiment with heterogeneous variances using asreml, MCMCglmm and SAS
I was working with a small experiment which includes families from two Eucalyptus species and thought it would be nice to code a first analysis using alternative approaches. The experiment is a randomized complete block design, with species as fixed effect and family and block as a random effects, while the response variable is growth strain (in ...
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Flotsam 12: early June linkathon
A list of interesting R/Stats quickies to keep the mind distracted: A long draft Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View by Cosma Shalizi, in which he uses R to drive home the message. Not your average elementary point of view. Good notes by Frank Davenport on starting using R with data from a Geographic Information System (GIS)...
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My take on the USA versus Western Europe comparison of GM corn
A few days ago I came across Jack Heinemann and collaborators’ article (Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest, Open Access) comparing the agricultural sectors of USA and Western Europe‡. While the article is titled around the word sustainability, the main comparison stems from the use of Genetically Modifie...
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Flotsam 13: early July links
Man flu kept me at home today, so I decided to do something ‘useful’ and go for a linkathon: Ed Yong discusses the effect of subject expectations in psychology experiments Nice Results, But What Did You Expect? At the beginning there was another article on The placebo phenomenon, and another one on The placebo defect. A googleVis tutorial to...
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Excel, fanaticism and R
This week I’ve been feeling tired of excessive fanaticism (or zealotry) of open source and R in general. I do use a fair amount of OSS and pushed for the adoption of R in our courses; in fact I do think OSS is a good thingTM. I do not like, however, constant yabbering on why using exclusively OSS in science is a good idea and the reduction of s...
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Using Processing and R together (in OS X)
I wanted to develop a small experiment with a front end using the Processing language and the backend calculations in R; the reason why will be another post. This post explained the steps assuming that one already has R and Processing installed: Install the Rserve package. This has to be done from source (e.g. using R CMD INSTALL packagename). D...
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