Publications by Gavin L. Simpson
Harvesting Canadian climate data
In December I found myself helping one of our graduate students with a data problem; for one of their thesis chapters they needed a lot of hourly climate data for a handful of stations around Saksatchewan. All of this data was and is available for download from the Government of Canada’s website, but with one catch; you had to download the hour...
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Drawing rarefaction curves with custom colours
I was sent an email this week by a vegan user who wanted to draw rarefaction curves using rarecurve() but with different colours for each curve. The solution to this one is quite easy as rarecurve() has argument col so the user could supply the appropriate vector of colours to use when plotting. However, they wanted to distinguish all 26 of their...
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Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
On Twitter and elsewhere there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth for some time over one particular aspect of the R ecosphere: CRAN. I’m not here to argue that everything is peachy — far from it in fact — but I am going to argue that the problems we face do not begin and end with CRAN or one or more of it’s maintainers. Before I...
10256 sym
My aversion to pipes
At the risk of coming across as even more of a curmudgeonly old fart than people already think I am, I really do dislike the current vogue in R that is the pipe family of binary operators; e.g. %>%. Introduced by Hadley Wickham and popularised and advanced via the magrittr package by Stefan Milton Bache, the basic idea brings the forward pipe of ...
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User-friendly scaling
Back in the mists of time, whilst programming early versions of Canoco, Cajo ter Braak decided to allow users to specify how species and site ordination scores were scaled relative to one another via a simple numeric coding system. This was fine for the DOS-based software that Canoco was at the time; you entered 2 when prompted and you got specie...
3667 sym R (284 sym/3 pcs) 2 img
User-friendly scaling
Back in the mists of time, whilst programming early versions of Canoco, Cajo ter Braak decided to allow users to specify how species and site ordination scores were scaled relative to one another via a simple numeric coding system. This was fine for the DOS-based software that Canoco was at the time; you entered 2 when prompted and you got specie...
3671 sym R (284 sym/3 pcs) 2 img
Climate change and spline interactions
In a series of irregular posts1 I’ve looked at how additive models can be used to fit non-linear models to time series. Up to now I’ve looked at models that included a single non-linear trend, as well as a model that included a within-year (or seasonal) part and a trend part. In this trend plus season model it is important to note that the tw...
13043 sym R (5400 sym/24 pcs) 12 img
Climate change and spline interactions
In a series of irregular posts1 I’ve looked at how additive models can be used to fit non-linear models to time series. Up to now I’ve looked at models that included a single non-linear trend, as well as a model that included a within-year (or seasonal) part and a trend part. In this trend plus season model it is important to note that the tw...
13060 sym R (5277 sym/24 pcs) 12 img
Are some seasons warming more than others?
I ended the last post with some pretty plots of air temperature change within and between years in the Central England Temperature series. The elephant in the room1 at the end of that post was is the change in the within year (seasonal) effect over time statistically significant? This is the question I’ll try to answer, or at least show how to ...
5733 sym R (2629 sym/13 pcs) 4 img
Are some seasons warming more than others?
I ended the last post with some pretty plots of air temperature change within and between years in the Central England Temperature series. The elephant in the room1 at the end of that post was is the change in the within year (seasonal) effect over time statistically significant? This is the question I’ll try to answer, or at least show how to ...
5735 sym R (2629 sym/13 pcs) 4 img