Publications by hilaryparker
The Setup (Part 1)
One of the more challenging things about beginning graduate school was learning what tools and software I needed in order to work efficiently. Unlike college where software requirements were laid out in front of me and everyone seemed to use the same tools, in graduate school the obscurity of the tools, as well as the number of options, seemed to...
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Love for ProjectTemplate
The advantage about writing a blog post about the tools you wish that you’d used throughout grad school is that, well, it makes you check them out. I went through the ProjectTemplate tutorial, and I’m hooked. Here’s the advantages as I see them: Routine is your friend. This could really go for everything in your life. Small decisions contr...
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Creating a random calendar with R
Sometimes this is my life. But it’s so satisfying when you write a program that saves you time! Here is an example. The Problem: For several years at Hopkins I have been involved in teaching a large (500+ person) introductory Biostatistics class. This class usually has a team of 12-15 teaching assistants, who together staff the twice-daily...
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Hilary: the most poisoned baby name in US history
I’ve always had a special fondness for my name, which — according to Ryan Gosling in “Lars and the Real Girl” — is a scientific fact for most people (Ryan Gosling constitutes scientific proof in my book). Plus, the root word for Hilary is the Latin word “hilarius” meaning cheerful and merry, which is the same root word for “hilari...
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Personal R Packages
I came across this R package on GitHub, and it made me so excited that I decided to write a post about it. It’s a compilation by Karl Broman of various R functions that he’s found helpful to write throughout the years. Wouldn’t it be great if incoming graduate students in Biostatistics/Statistics were taught to create a personal repository ...
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Writing an R package from scratch
As I have worked on various projects at Etsy, I have accumulated a suite of functions that help me quickly produce tables and charts that I find useful. Because of the nature of iterative development, it often happens that I reuse the functions many times, mostly through the shameful method of copying the functions into the project directory. I h...
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Sunsets in Google Calendar using R
I live (and work!) near one of the most beautiful vantage points for sunsets in possibly the entire US. However almost every beautiful sunset I have seen from there has come from either 1) me walking out of work and noticing that the sky is bright pink, or 2) seeing someone post a sunset photo on Twitter (I know). Either way it ends with me prac...
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