Every R package has its story. Some packages are written by experts, some bynovices. Some are developed quickly, others were long in the making. This is thestory of jstor, a package which I developed during my time as a student ofsociology, working in a research project on the scientific elite withinsociology.
At rOpenSci we are developing on a suite of packages that expose powerful graphics and imaging libraries in R. Our latest addition is av – a new package for working with audio/video based on the FFmpeg AV libraries. This ambitious new project will become the video counterpart of the magick package which we use for working with images.
Background Surveys are ubiquitous in the social sciences, and the best of them are meticulously planned out. Statisticians often decide on a sample size based on a theoretical design, and then proceed to inflate this number to account for “sample losses”. This ensures that the desired sample size is achieved, even in the presence of non-response.
Hundreds of thousands of people in east Africa have been displaced and hundreds have died as a result of torrential rains which ended a drought but saturated soils and engorged rivers, resulting in extreme flooding in 2018.This post will explore these events using the R package smapr, which provides access to global satellite-derived soil moisture data collected by the NASA Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) mission and abstracts away some of
This week version 2.0 of the mongolite package has been released to CRAN. Major new features in this release include support for MongoDB 4.0, GridFS, running database commands, and connection pooling. Mongolite is primarily an easy-to-use client to get data in and out of MongoDB. However it supports increasingly many advanced features like aggregation, indexing, map-reduce, streaming, encryption, and enterprise authentication.
In this technote I will outline what phylotaR was developed for, how to install it and how to run it with some simple examples. What is phylotaR? In any phylogenetic analysis it is important to identify sequences that share the same orthology – homologous sequences separated by speciation events. This is often performed by simply searching an online sequence repository using sequence labels.
eBird is an online tool for recording birdobservations. The eBird database currently contains over 500 millionrecords of bird sightings, spanning every country and nearly every birdspecies, making it an extremely valuable resource for bird research andconservation. These data can be used to map the distribution andabundance of species, and assess how species’ ranges are changing overtime. This dataset is available for download as a text file;
Motivation A few weeks ago, as part of the rOpenSci Unconference, a group of us (Sean Hughes, Malisa Smith, Angela Li, Ju Kim, and Ted Laderas) decided to work on making the UMAP algorithm accessible within R. UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a dimensionality reduction technique that allows the user to reduce high dimensional data (multiple columns) into a smaller number of columns for visualization purposes (github,
The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF images with thousands of colors per frame and do so much faster than other software.
R packages are widely used in science, yet the code behind them often does not come under scrutiny. To address this lack, rOpenSci has been a pioneer in developing a peer review process for R packages. The goal of pkginspector is to help that process by providing a means to better understand the internal structure of R packages.
