As a lab scientist, I do almost all of my experiments in microtiter plates. These tools are an efficient means of organizing many parallel experimental conditions. It’s not always easy, however, to translate between the physical plate and a useful data structure for analysis. My first attempts to solve this problem–nesting one ifelse call inside of the next to describe which well was which–were very unsatisfying.

Whether you are an environmental scientist, a pollution expert or just concerned about the air you breathe when cycling in the United Kingdom, the ropensci rdefra package can help find the information you need. This package gives you access to the UK-AIR database, hosted by the Department for Environment, Food &

Code review, in which peers manually inspect the source code of softwarewritten by others, is widely recognized as one of the best tools for findingbugs in software. Code review is relatively uncommon in scientific softwaredevelopment, though.