Publications by benjaminlmoore
9 reasons to use RStudio
In no particular order, here are nine reasons why I really like the RStudio IDE for the R statistical programming language. 1) R benefits from an IDE – I accept that in some languages an IDE is unnecessary—Perl is the first example that comes to mind—and in some languages it’s near-essential (Java). A good case can be made that R is at ...
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Analyse your bank statements using R
Online banking has made reviewing statements and transferring money more convenient than ever before, but most still rely on external methods for looking at their personal finances. However, many banks will happily give you access to long-term transaction logs, and these provide a great opportunity to take a DIY approach. I’ll be walking throug...
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Meticulously recreating bitmap plots in R
There’s a hard-fought drive on Wikimedia commons to convert those images that should be in vector format (i.e. graphs, diagrams) from their current bitmap form. At the time of writing, the relevant category has over 7000 images in the category “Images that should use vector graphics”. The usual way people move between the two is by tracing ...
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Slidify: Modern, simple presentations written in R Markdown
As a LaTeX fan I’m used to using Beamer for presentations, but the built-in themes are definitely starting to show their age — and writing a custom .sty file looks like a nightmare — so for a while I’ve been looking at trying out an HTML5 framework. Reveal.js is a great looking HTML presentation framework from Hakim El Hattab. The first ...
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What are the most common RNG seeds used in R scripts on Github?
In the R programming language, the random number generator (RNG) is seeded each session using the current time and process ID. Via the magic of the popular Mersenne Twister PRNG, the values stored in .Random.seed are used sequentially each time “randomness” is invoked in a function. This means, of course, that the same function run in differe...
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Guardian data blog — UK general election analysis in R
The Guardian newspaper has for a few years been running a data blog and has built up a massive repository of (often) well-curated datasets on a huge number of topics. They even have an indexed list of all data sets they’ve put together or reused in their articles. It’s a great repository of interesting data for exploratory analysis, and the...
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Author inflation in academic literature
There seems to be a general consensus that author lists in academic articles are growing. Wikipedia says so, and I’ve also come across a published letter and short Nature article which accept this is the case and discuss ways of mitigating the issue. Recently there was an interesting discussion on academia.stackexchange on the subject but again...
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What are the most overrated films?
“Overrated” and “underrated” are slippery terms to try to quantify. An interesting way of looking at this, I thought, would be to compare the reviews of film critics with those of Joe Public, reasoning that a film which is roundly-lauded by the Hollywood press but proved disappointing for the real audience would be “overrated” and vi...
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Celebrity twitter followers by gender
The most popular accounts on twitter have millions of followers, but what are their demographics like? Twitter doesn’t collect or release this kind of information, and even things like name and location are only voluntarily added to people’s profiles. Unlike Google+ and Facebook, twitter has no real name policy, they don’t care what you c...
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EdinbR: A new R usergroup for Edinburgh
Inspired by succesful RUGs like LondonR and CambR, I’m pleased to announce a new R usergroup for those in and around Edinburgh: EdinbR! Edinburgh has a large research community using R, spread across different campuses and even universities so a centralised discussion group is long overdue. Many R packages have been developed by Edinburgh rese...
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