Publications by nsaunders
Twitter Coverage of the ISMB/ECCB Conference 2017
Search all the hashtags ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology – which sounds rather old-fashioned now, doesn’t it?) is the largest conference for bioinformatics and computational biology. It is held annually and, when in Europe, jointly with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB). I’ve had the good fortune to atte...
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Years as coloured bars
I keep seeing years represented by coloured bars. First it was that demographic tsunami chart. Then there are examples like the one on the right, which came up in a web search today. I even saw one (whispers) at work today. I get what they are trying to do – illustrate trends within categories over time – but I don’t think years as coloured...
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Infographic-style charts using the R waffle package
Infographics. I’ve seen good examples. I’ve seen more bad examples. In general, I prefer a good chart to an infographic. That said, there’s a “genre” of infographic that I do think is useful, which I’ll call “if X were 100 Y”. A good example: if the world were 100 people. That method of showing proportions has been called a waffle...
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Feels like a dry winter – but what does the data say?
A reminder that when idle queries pop into your head, the answer can often be found using R + online data. And a brief excursion into accessing the Weather Underground. One interesting aspect of Australian life, even in coastal urban areas like Sydney, is that sometimes it just stops raining. For weeks or months at a time. The realisation hits sl...
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XML parsing made easy: is that podcast getting longer?
Sometime in 2009, I began listening to a science podcast titled This Week in Virology, or TWiV for short. I thought it was pretty good and listened regularly up until sometime in 2016, when it seemed that most episodes were approaching two hours in duration. I listen to several podcasts when commuting to/from work, which takes up about 10 hours o...
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Mapping data using R and leaflet
The R language provides many different tools for creating maps and adding data to them. I’ve been using the leaflet package at work recently, so I thought I’d provide a short example here. Whilst searching for some data that might make a nice map, I came across this article at ABC News. It includes a table containing Australian members of par...
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Twitter coverage of the Australian Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Society Conference 2017
You know the drill by now. Grab the tweets. Generate the report using RMarkdown. Push to Github. Publish to RPubs. This time it’s the Australian Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Society Conference 2017, including the COMBINE symposium. Looks like a good time was had by all in Adelaide. A couple of quirks this time around. First, the rtwee...
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Farewell then, PubMed Commons
PubMed Commons, the NCBI’s experiment in comments for PubMed articles, has been discontinued. Thoroughly too, with all traces of it expunged from the NCBI website. Last time I wrote about the service, I concluded “all it needs now is more active users, more comments per user and a real API.” None of those things happened. Result: “NIH has...
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Moving from RPubs to Github documents
If you still follow my Twitter feed – I pity you, as it’s been rather boring of late. Consisting largely of Github commit messages, many including the words “knit to github document”. Here’s why. RPubs, an early offering from RStudio, has been a great platform for easy and free publishing of HTML documents generated from RMarkdown and w...
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PubMed retractions report has moved
A brief message for anyone who uses my PubMed retractions report. It’s no longer available at RPubs; instead, you will find it here at Github. Github pages hosting is great, once you figure out that docs/ corresponds to your web root 🙂 Now I really must update the code and try to make it more interesting than a bunch of bar charts. Related ...
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