The R Universe

My R packages are now listed at the R universe, a new web site with a repository of packages accesible in multiple ways.  It is implemented as a database rather than being static like CRAN.

The R Universe seems like a good tool to not only find packages but also to monitor their health. Its search engine based on package description should help find packages much more efficiently than a search with Google.

R for photobiology packages

I have published through CRAN a suite of R packages for calculation and plotting tasks commonly needed in photobiology. Additional information and on-line documentation are available at The R for Photobiology Website.

This is open source, free to use and modify software that aims to make it easier for all photobiologists to do calculations correctly and play with example data. In addition, the example data facilitates the production of original illustrations for use in teaching and text books.

Continue reading “R for photobiology packages”

Software for solar and lamp radiation calculations and acquisition

As part of my participation in the COST Action UV4growth I have been working on an R packages for analysing and acquiring spectral data using the R system for statistics. They are described and can be downloaded from the blog of the Technical Group 1 (TG1) of the COST Action. The package UVcalc is at version 1.2.0 and will be ready for wide use after a few days of additional testing. There are another two packages under development, but not yet ready for release: one of them is for applying advanced correction algorithms as developed by Lasse Ylianttila from STUK for improving the performance of array spectrometers in the UV region of the spectrum. Another package under development will allow the control and acquisition of spectral data from Ocean Optics spectrometers directly from within R. If you are willing to test or use any of these packages, or even help with the coding, please, contact me. The packages will be released under GPL licence and at the moment are in a Git repository hosted at Bitbucket. The UVcalc repository is already public, the others are private.

RStudio 0.97

If you use the R System for Statistics, you should be using RStudio. It has been evolving very quickly, and it is very powerful. It is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and now supports the development and building of packages for R.

The announcement gives a detailed list of what is new in this release.

RStudio

Current version is 0.96 and now with the ability to create projects it is really a very nice front-end for R. I use it whenever I use R. Most of the little problems of earlier releases are now over. It can be downloaded from: http://rstudio.org/

Drawing flowcharts

I have been drawing some flowcharts lately using the free yEd program. Earlier I used Visual Thought, another free program, but it has not been updated for more than ten years, and it is no longer available for download. yEd is very easy to use and has a command that adjusts the layout of the charts.  Recommended! It can be downloaded (in versions for Windows, OS X and Linux) at http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

Here is an example chart:

A flow chart drawn with yEd

Three R books available in ebook

A Beginner’s Guide to R
Introductory Statistics with R
Data Manipulation with R

These three books are available in ebook version through our library. You even can download PDF. I read the first book, well, some chapters, from Pedro’s office library. It was quite nice for the beginners like me. I checked the third book also. Not bad either, if you need some basic guide to data analysis.