So, I’ve blogged about this topic before, way back on 5 Jan this year. Matt Helmus, a postdoc in the Wootton lab at the University of Chicago, published a paper with Anthony Ives in Ecological Monographs this year (abstract here). The paper addressed a new statistical approach to phylogenetic community structure. As I said in the original post, part of the power of the PGLMM (phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models) approach is that you don’t have to conduct quite so many separate statistical tests as with the previous null model/randomization approach. ...

Regular expressions are a powerful in any language to manipulate, search, etc. data. For example: > fruit <- c("apple", "banana", "pear", "pineapple") > fruit [1] "apple" "banana" "pear" "pineapple" > grep("a", fruit) # there is an "a" in each of the words [1] 1 2 3 4 > > strsplit("a string", "s") # strsplit splits the string on the "s" [[1]] [1] "a " "tring" R base has many functions for regular expressions, see slide 9 of Ed’s talk below. The package stringr, created by Hadley Wickham, is a nice alternative that wraps the base regex functions for easier use. I highly recommend stringr. ...

Rolf Lohaus, a Huxley postdoctoral fellow here in the EEB dept at Rice University, gave our R course a talk on basic visualizations in R this morning. Enjoy!

Crowdsourced funding is becoming a sustainable way for various artists, entrepreneurs, etc. to get their idea funded from individuals. For example, think of Kickstarter and RocketHub. Jai Ranganathan and Jarrett Byrnes have started an experiment to determine how well crowdfunding can work for scientists: The SciFund Challenge. Go here to signup and here for their website. The deadline to sign up is Oct. 1

Ten Simple Rules for Open Access Publishers View more presentations from Philip Bourne

The O’Reilly Media Strata Summit has many interviews on YouTube (just search YouTube for it) Drew Conway is the author of a R packages, including infochimps, an R wrapper to the Infochimps API service. The YouTube video:

Carl Boettiger gave a talk on the topic of open science to incoming UC Davis graduate students. Here is the audio click here Here are the slides clickhere

UPDATE: I put in an R tutorial as a Github gist below. Here is a short intro R talk I gave today…for what it’s worth… R Introduction View more presentations from schamber Here’s the tutorial in a GitHub gist: https://gist.github.com/1208321

Note: thanks to Scott for inviting me to contribute to the Recology blog despite being an ecology outsider; my work is primarily in atomic physics. -Pascal A part of me has always liked thinking about how to effectively present information, but until the past year, I had not read much to support my (idle) interest in information visualization. That changed in the spring when I read Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a book that stimulated me to think more deeply about presenting information. I originally started with a specific task in mind–a wonderful tool for focusing one’s interests–but quickly found that Tufte’s book was less a practical guide and more a list of general design principles. Then, a few months ago, I stumbled upon Nathan Yau’s blog, FlowingData, and found out he was writing a practical guide to design and visualization. Conveniently enough for me, Yau’s book, Visualize This, would be released within a month of my discovery of his blog; what follows are my impressions of Visualize This. ...

FigShare - I very much like this idea of a place to put your data online that is NOT published. Dryad is a nice place for datastes linked with published papers, but there isn’t really a place for datasets that perhaps did not make the cut for a published paper, and if known to the scientific community, could potentially help resolve the “file-drawer” effect in meta-analyses. (wow, run on sentence) ...