
R in Ecology - gk1
http://blog.dominodatalab.com/r-in-ecology/
======
huac
I was surprised by how little domain-specific info this post has for its
title. It's pretty much the same as every other 'using R' post.

At any rate, for those looking to do distance sampling/other ecological work,
check out this book:
[https://github.com/dill/RDistanceBook](https://github.com/dill/RDistanceBook)
and this site: [http://distancesampling.org/](http://distancesampling.org/)

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Wonnk13
Wow, i know nothing about Ecology, but used to be pretty proficient in R. I
don't recognize half those libraries. I think R can pretty well be divided
into pre and post "Hadley Wickham" eras. It's really a new language.

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phillc73
> library(dplyr) # gives us the gift of pipes “%>%”

Actually, it was magrittr[0]. dplyr popularised their use.

[0]
[https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/magrittr/index.html](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/magrittr/index.html)

~~~
hadley
It's a bit more complicated than that - dplyr and magrittr invented pipes
independently at about the same time. I preferred magrittr's implementation,
so switched to that. dplyr continues to import and re-export %>% so that you
don't need to explicitly load magrittr.

~~~
muhic
I wasn't aware of this parallel origin for the pipe. Just out of curiosity
what did magrittr's implementation have over dplyr's? Thanks for incorporating
forward piping in dplyr, it improves functional order/readability by miles!

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larrydag
As a statistician I believe this article shows the strengths of R

\- fast prototyping methods

\- easily repeat research with scripts

\- data visualization

\- huge repository of add-on libraries from many areas of study

Sure R has it setbacks. I wouldn't rely on it for a production environment or
a substitute for a higher level programming language. Yet if you want to study
data and get results rather quick there is few that could compete in this
space.

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brudgers
_This is a guest post from Auriel Fournier, a PhD Candidate with the Arkansas
Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Arkansas._

A real life example of what Scott Hanselman calls "a dark matter
programmer"...he uses "the chief software architect of the Nebraska division
of forestry."

~~~
imh
For other people like me, who didn't know what this was referring to, I think
this is the post brudgers is talking about
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)

~~~
brudgers
Except for the past few weeks, I've listened to all of Hanselman's _Hansel
Minutes_ podcasts, started in summer 2014 and got current about a year ago.
Interesting content while driving in my opinion.

Anyway, he uses the term fairly regularly as a way of grounding discussions
when they drift toward the-newest-shinyest or what-the-cool-kids-use. I think
it's a helpful construct when thinking about "what should I use" since the
best answer usually isn't React Native.

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Demagog
It is very weird to me, why he doesn't use more of tidyr and dplyr. Those are
wonderful packages. The whole part of changing types of data frame, would
become single call to `mutate` from dplyr package.

There is great blog [0] post explaining working with those tools. What is most
important here, is that dplyr and tidyr makes data organization and analysis
concise, effecient and readable way.

[0] [http://zevross.com/blog/2015/01/13/a-new-data-processing-
wor...](http://zevross.com/blog/2015/01/13/a-new-data-processing-workflow-for-
r-dplyr-magrittr-tidyr-ggplot2/)

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pvaldes
I miss some important packages here (IMAO), but is an interesting entry to
further readings.

Otherwise, I don't really understand the hype with that %>% thing and did not
find nothing about this structure in a quick google search. I would really
appreciate if someone can enlight this fool. Thanks.

------
aurelien
R is good for ecology now that Microsoft own it -_-'

~~~
mateo411
What do you mean Microsoft owns R? It's an open source project under the GNU
license.

~~~
adenadel
Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics

[http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/microsoft-r-
open...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/microsoft-r-open.html)

Edit: Just saying why the GP claimed Microsoft "owns" R, which they clearly
don't.

~~~
mateo411
Interesting, but it looks like they have a fork of R. They package it
differently, and provide some performance enhancements.

