Publications by Ari Lamstein
R Programmers: What is your biggest problem when working with Census data?
A few weeks ago I announced my latest project: Data Science instruction at the Census Bureau. In addition to announcing the project, I also snuck a bit of market research into the post. I asked people the types of analyses they do when working with Census data. I also asked what packages they use when solving those problems. 23 people left commen...
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Update on My Collaboration with the Census Bureau
In November I announced a new collaboration with the Census Bureau around data science training. Today I’d like to provide an update on this project. I recently presented a draft of my first course for this project internally and it was well received. The working title of this course is Mapping State ACS Data in R with Choroplethr. We are using...
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Difficult to Reproduce Choroplethr Bug: Can You Help?
Since November 2017 I have received three bug reports from users who see this error when running any command in the choroplethr package: Theme element panel.border missing Error in if (theme$panel.ontop) { : argument is of length zero Normally when someone reports a choroplethr bug that I cannot reproduce I recommend they do the fo...
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Update: “Difficult to Reproduce Choroplethr Bug” Isolated and Fixed
Yesterday I wrote that I’ve received a number of choroplethr bug reports recently that I simply cannot reproduce. Due to a large number of people replying with their system information, along with whether or not they were able to reproduce the bug, I was able to track it down. Thank you to everyone who helped! It appears that the issue only occ...
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My Proposal to the R Consortium
I recently submitted a Proposal to the R Consortium. I decided to share this proposal on my blog for two reasons: To raise awareness of an opportunity I see in the R ecosystem. To raise awareness of the R Consortium as a funding source for R projects. I first learned about the R Consortium when I attended the Boston EARL Conference in 2015. Whe...
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New Version of ggplot2
I just received a note from Hadley Wickham that a new version of ggplot2 is scheduled to be submitted to CRAN on June 25. Here’s what choroplethr users need to know about this new version of ggplot2. Choroplethr Update Required The new version of ggplot2 introduces bugs into choroplethr. In particular, choroplethr does not pass R cmd check when...
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Choroplethr v3.6.2 is now on CRAN
A new version of Choroplethr is now on CRAN! You can get it by typing the following from the R Console: install.packages("choroplethr") I encourage all Choroplethr users to install this new version! Overview A new version of ggplot2 will be released shortly. This new version of ggplot2 introduces many new features. These new features, however, co...
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New Version of Choroplethr.com!
Last year I decided to take out the domain Choroplethr.com. I used it to host information about Choroplethr, my suite of R packages for mapping demographic statistics. A year and a half later, I’ve made the first significant change to the site! The old version of Choroplethr.com was structured as a series of essays that demonstrated how to use ...
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Census Academy Update!
Last year I announced a collaboration with the Census Bureau to help with their new online training platform. This website, called “Census Academy”, is designed to help the public learn how to work with data that the Census Bureau publishes. Census Academy recently had a soft launch, and there is already a lot of content on it. I’ve marked...
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R Consortium Proposal Accepted!
Today I am happy to announce that my proposal to the R Consortium was accepted! I first announced that I was submitting a proposal back in March. As a reminder, the proposal has two distinct parts: Creating a guide to working with US Census data in R. Creating an R Consortium Working Group focused on US Census Data. If you’d like to read the ...
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