Here’s a tale about empirical work that demonstrates a simple rule: the deeper you go, the harder it gets.

\ Code is often arranged in packages for any given language. Packages are often cataloged in a package registry of some kind: NPM for node, crates.io for Rust, etc. For R, that registry is either CRAN or Bioconductor (for the most part). CRAN has the concept of an archived package.

taxizedb arose from pain in using taxize when dealing with large amounts of data in a single request or doing a lot of requests of any data size. taxize works with remote data sources on the web, so there’s a number of issues that can slow the response down: internet speed, server response speed (was a response already cached or not; or do they even use caching), etc.

Inspired by an email exchange I had with someone on theoretically non-exclusive hypotheses in Bayesian process tracing, I believed it might be useful to write down some thoughts in a blog post. It ended up as a PDF on Github because it has a minor R element and formal notation.

Here are 10 tips for making charts that pop.

I take a break from political economy and talk computer science.

Probablemente sientes que estamos inundados con información sobre la evolución de la pandemia de COVID-19. Sin embargo, nada mejor que manejar los datos uno mismo y analizarlos desde distintos puntos de vista. Creo que siempre hay alguien que observará algo en los datos que se nos ha escapado a millones de observadores y creo que cualquier aporte en esta emergencia mundial es valioso.

Now that I’m on the tenure track, I’ve been looking for a way to keep track of my different research projects so I can get them all finished and published. Matt Lebo’s “Managing Your Research Pipeline” presents a neat way of quantifying and tracking the progress of your research, and I recently adopted it for my own stuff. I even made a fancy R Markdown + flexdashboard dashboard to show the status of the pipeline interactively.

Here are ten tips for making your research open to fellow scientists.

I show you my code for making pretty charts in ggplot.