How long is your to-do list? Five? Ten? Fifteen items? Do you ever feel a sense of dread looking down the list, and then, (to numb the pain), rather than getting started, do you ever find yourself scrolling through your email, slack, or social media channels? And by the end Read more…
This week, after months at home, I was fortunate enough to go swimming in the sea. I was delighting in the sense of infinity that comes from an unbroken horizon, the chaotic force of the waves and the sparkle of the sun upon them. Then, over the sound of the Read more…
This week, we’re half way through 2020! It certainly feels like we are at a turning point in this crazy year, and so this is an ideal time to pause, reflect and plan. We can take this opportunity to put in place productive habits that will ensure we can look Read more…
This global pandemic has disrupted all of our lives. Many people are distracted, stressed and sleeping badly. Job losses are being announced, and many plans for the year lie in tatters. However, I believe this time of crisis can be a positive turning point in the careers and lives of Read more…
Is your organisation’s data as clean as its toilets? This weekend, I spent over two hours deep cleaning our downstairs bathroom. Let’s be clear. I’m not one of those people who loves cleaning. However, we do have three vivacious kids who enjoy playing outside (barefoot) and so a certain amount Read more…
the power of packages in R One of the wonderful things about R / RStudio are the many, many packages which expand the capabilities of R. There are a suite of packages that I use most weeks – these include ggplot2 (for plotting), data.table (for fast data manipulation) and foreign Read more…
Is data.table or tidyverse’s dplyr faster at summarising data? When dealing with large datasets, I commonly have to summarise data in order to discover, and then communicate the relevant information. Tabular summaries in R like these are similar to using a pivot table in Excel, but with two differences: 1) Read more…
Chances are that you have started to hear more about R in the last few years, and you’ve wondered if you should be using it in your work. In this post I explore the reasons why I now use R for almost all my work with environmental and infrastructure data. Read more…
Do you ever face a blank script, and not know where to start? This is one reason I find it useful to have a template to follow for my R scripts. The three main reasons I use a template are as follows: a template gets me started, so I rarely Read more…
I always encourage my students (and myself) to try to work in a reproducible manner. It is a bit slower at the start but pays dividends in the end when you have to re-do things (which happens all the time) or if you misplace some data. To work reproducibly, when Read more…