The general struggle Something that will make life easier in the long-run can be the most difficult thing to do today. For coders, prioritising the long term may involve an overhaul of current practice and the learning of a new skill. This can be painful for a number of reasons: We have to admit to ourselves that we’ve been doing things inefficiently (i.e. wasting time). This makes us feel stupid and fosters a sense of missed opportunity: we could’ve done something cool with the time we’d have saved (e.

If you read my reflection #1 on rOpenSci Onboarding, then you know I see value in the Onboarding process. A LOT of value even. This post is about where that value lies. This question has important corollaries which I will explore here based on my experience as a reviewer of bowerbird: How is a package peer reviewer’s time best spent? When is the best time in a software package’s life cycle to undertake peer review?

Hydrology is a concept to unify statistics, data analysis and numerical models in order to understand and analyze the endless circulation of water between the earth and its atmosphere. That’s a lot alike Data Science, isn’t it? Hydrologic Processes evolve in space and time, are extremely complex and we may never comprehend them. For this reason Hydrologists use models where their inputs and outputs are measurable variables: climatic and hydrologic data, land uses, vegetation coverage, soil type etc.

Olfactory Coding Detecting volatile chemicals and encoding these into neuronal activity is a vital task for all animals that is performed by their olfactory sensory systems. While these olfactory systems vary vastly between species regarding their numerical complexity, they are amazingly similar in their general structure. The periphery of olfactory systems consists of different classes of olfactory sensory neurons (OSN). In mammals, OSNs are located in the nose, in insects, OSNs are located on the antenna.

I am happy to say that the latest issue of The R Journal includes a paper describing rentrez, the rOpenSci package for retrieving data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The NCBI is one of the most important sources of biological data. The centre provides access to information on 28 million scholarly articles through PubMed and 250 million DNA sequences through GenBank. More importantly, records in the 50 public databases maintained by the NCBI are strongly cross-referenced.