Posts

As a biostatistics student, I use R very frequently when analyzing data. At the same time, I interact with other researchers, some who know how to use R (R crowd) and some who don’t (yet!

Note: the Fall event will be student and post doc only while the Spring event will be open to the whole department. This is to smooth the integration process for the new students.

I am currently trying to understand how to reduce the memory used by mclapply. This function is rather complicated and others have explained the differences versus parLapply (A_Skelton73, 2013; lockedoff, 2012 ) and also made it clear that in mclapply each job does not know if the others are running out of memory and thus cannot trigger gc (Urbanek, 2012).

As you might have noticed, I recently decided to move Fellgernon Bit from Tumblr to GitHub. There are a couple of reasons why I made this change. I wanted a more professional-looking blog.

For the past year and a half I have been a teaching assistant (TA) for the Statistical Methods in Public Health I to IV (140.621 to 140.624) courses. As part of being a TA for these courses, we have to grade between 30 and 50 homeworks every two weeks or so: four problem sets per eight week terms.

In recent weeks, I have met with a group of students @jhubiostat interested in blogging about their research, tutorials, pieces of R code, among plenty of other subjects. Within this group we had the idea to aggregate our blogs so it would be easier for others to follow us and to easily promote our own blogs to a much larger audience.

It is time to revive Fellgernon Bit from it’s deep hibernation period. A couple of very motivated Ph.D. students from my department (John, Alyssa, Amanda, Jean-Philippe, Elizabeth, etc) are organizing a blogging group.

Starting this week, I’ll be doing my research with the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD) as Andrew Jaffe's first Ph.D. student there. My main advisor will continue to be Jeff Leek which is great for me.

ggplot TutorialI liked the following ggplot2 tutorial which is featured in Gabriela de Queiroz’s blog called unbiasedestimator. The tutorial looks very neatly presented and I’m sure that it will be very helpful to anyone just getting started with ggplot2 before they jump into ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis by Hadley Wickham or R Graphics Cookbook by Winston Chang.