Summary: I’m involved in organising a hackathon, and I’d love you to take part. The open-source GeoTAM hackathon focuses on estimating turnover for individual business locations in the UK, from a variety of open datasets. Please checkout the hackathon page and sign up. There are prizes of up to £2,000! (Click image for a larger […]
A key – but challenging – part of learning to program is moving from writing technically-correct code ‘that works’ to writing high-quality code that is sensibly decomposed into functions, generically-applicable and generally ‘good’. Indeed, you could say that this is exactly what Software Carpentry is about – taking you from someone bodging together a few […]
Summary: Put a plaintext file named CITATION in the root directory of your code, and put information in it about how to cite your software. Go on, do it now – it’ll only take two minutes! Software is very important in science – but good software takes time and effort that could be used to do […]
UPDATE: I’ve created a new site to host my John Snow data, and included various other modern formats (GeoPackage, GeoJSON etc). Please go there to download the data. In honour of the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth – and because I was asked to by someone via email – I have now released my digitisation […]
As you might know from some of my previous posts, I’m a big fan of making my scientific work reproducible. My main reasons for being so keen on this are: Reproducibility is key to science – if it can’t be reproduced then it can not be verified (that is, the experiment can’t be tried again to […]
UPDATE: I’ve created a new site to host my John Snow data, and included various other modern formats (GeoPackage, GeoJSON etc). Please go there to download the data. In 1854 there was a massive cholera outbreak in Soho, London – in three days over 120 people died from the disease. Famously, John Snow plotted the […]
If you are creating maps then for goodness sake Use sensible colours! I was helping some undergraduates with some work the other day, and they decided to use the following colour scheme for representing river depth: Deep water: Red Medium-depth water: Bright green Shallow water: Pink Why did they do this? Well, either they were […]
When clearing out some of my old programming books the other day I realised how far I’d come with programming over the years, and the number of different technologies that I have used over time. I thought I’d do a little summary post going from first programming experience to now – and it’s amazing what’s […]
Summary: Very useful for reference while producing graphs, and very comprehensive (including heat-maps, 3D graphs and maps). Reference: Mittal, H. V., 2011, R Graph Cookbook, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 272 pages, Publisher’s Website As a scientist I often need to plot graphs of my data, so I am keen to learn more about how to […]
Summary: Very comprehensive and very useful, but not good for a beginner. Great book though – definitely has a place on my bookshelf. Reference: Adler, J., 2010, R in a Nutshell, O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 611 pagesO’Reilly Link After reviewing a book about R designed for beginners (see my previous post) I thought I’d step up […]