Publications by Samuel Brown
Interactive function for distances in plots
The following R function returns the distance between two points located on a plot. The distance returned is in the same units as that of the plot.interDist aa dx dy sqrt(sum(c(dx^2, dy^2)))} Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: The Praise of In...
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Dynamite plots in R
For some time I’ve contemplated creating a function for creating the dynamite plots beloved by many of the applied sciences. There’s a lot of criticism regarding their utility, and there are several ways that present data in a more intelligible way. A search on the subject brings up pages with such emotive titles as “Dynamite pl...
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PhD week 7: Plotting and NIR spectroscopy
Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a technique that measures the amount of heat absorbed or emitted by certain materials. It is used in a variety of applications, but in the agricultural world, it is often used to determine the quality and composition of mixed materials such as stock forage. It uses electromagnetic radiation in the 800 to 2500 n...
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Alternate way of plotting means and errors
Last month, I wrote a post discussing dynamite plots, noting that they’re not considered to be especially good at presenting information. I got a little bit of flak for it, from people for and against dynamite plots. This post shows a different method of showing a point and an error bar. If you’re going to do it, why not make it l...
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An R function for finding coordinates of NZ localities
Over the course of my PhD, I will be doing a fair amount of georeferencing. This involves obtaining geographic coordinates for localities where weevil specimens have been collected. When I’m the one who has collected them, this is fairly straightforward—Google Maps has made obtaining coordinates a breeze. When it’s a museum spec...
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SPIDER makes the top 10 barcoding publications of 2012
In the recent Barcode Bulletin published by iBoL, our humble paper announcing the R package spider: Species identity and evolution made second on their list of the top 10 publications of 2012. Not bad for a side project! Spider is available for download from CRAN, and R-Forge. Be sure to check out the spider website as well for a tutorial on th...
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Loading all installed R packages
The other day I was trying to set up an R for Windows installation on a USB drive. As I don’t have a Windows machine, I had to use the university computer to do this task. However, for some reason, they’ve blocked R from downloading and installing packages using the install.packages() command. This required that I download the zip...
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