Publications by beckmw
A simple workflow for using R with Microsoft Office products
The challenge of integrating Microsoft products with R software has been an outstanding issue for several years. Reasons for these issues are complicated and related to fundamental differences in developing proprietary vs open-source products. To date, I don’t believe there has been a satisfactory solution but I present this blog as my attemp...
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Average dissertation and thesis length, take two
About a year ago I wrote a post describing average length of dissertations at the University of Minnesota. I've been meaning to expand that post by adding data from masters theses since the methods for gathering/parsing the records are transferable. This post provides some graphics and links to R code for evaluating dissertation (doctorate) and...
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Some love for ggplot2
With all the recent buzz about ggvis (this, this, and this) it’s often easy to forget all that ggplot2 offers as a graphics package. True, ggplot is a static approach to graphing unlike ggvis but it has fundamentally changed the way we think about plots in R. I recently spent some time thinking about some of the more useful features of ggplot...
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Back to square one – R and RStudio installation
I remember my first experience installing R. Basic installation can be humbling for someone not familiar with mirror networks or file binaries. I remember not knowing the difference between base and contrib… which one to select? The concept of CRAN and mirrors was also new to me. Which location do I choose and are they all the same? What th...
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NeuralNetTools 1.0.0 now on CRAN
After successfully navigating the perilous path of CRAN submission, I’m pleased to announce that NeuralNetTools is now available! From the description file, the package provides visualization and analysis tools to aid in the interpretation of neural networks, including functions for plotting, variable importance, and sensitivity analyses. I�...
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SWMPr 2.0.0 now on CRAN
I’m pleased to announce that my second R package, SWMPr, has been posted on CRAN. I developed this package to work with water quality time series data from the System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS). SWMP was established in 1995 to provide continuous environmental data at over 300 fixed s...
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Reinventing the wheel for ordination biplots with ggplot2
I’ll be the first to admit that the topic of plotting ordination results using ggplot2 has been visited many times over. As is my typical fashion, I started creating a package for this purpose without completely searching for existing solutions. Specifically, the ggbiplot and factoextra packages already provide almost complete coverage of plo...
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SWMPr 2.1.0 on CRAN
I’ve just released an updated version of my package for estuary monitoring data, SWMPr, available on CRAN. I’ve made several additions to the package since it’s initial release – nothing too crazy but enough to warrant another push to CRAN and blog post. I’ve been pretty bad about regular updates but I’ve added a few features to make...
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Predicting tides in R
Skip to TL/DR…. Water movement in estuaries is affected by many processes acting across space and time. Tidal exchange with the ocean is an important hydrodynamic process that can define several characteristics of an estuary. Physical flushing rates and water circulation are often controlled by tidal advection, whereas chemical and biological c...
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