Tom Miller (a prof here at Rice) and Brian Inouye have a paper out in Ecology (paper, appendices) that confronts two-sex models of dispersal with empirical data. They conducted the first confrontation of two-sex demographic models with empirical data on lab populations of bean beetles Callosobruchus. Their R code for the modeling work is available at Ecological Archives (link here). Here is a figure made from running the five blocks of code in ‘Miller_and_Inouye_figures.txt’ that reproduces Fig. 4 (A-E) in their Ecology paper (p = proportion female, Nt = density). Nice! ...

So, there is a new food web dataset out that was put in Ecological Archives here, and I thought I would play with it. The food web is from Otago Harbour, an intertidal mudflat ecosystem in New Zealand. The web contains 180 nodes, with 1,924 links. Fun stuff… igraph, default layout plot igraph, circle layout plot, nice My funky little gggraph function plotget the gggraph function, and make it better, here at Github

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