Today I wanted to try something new; so instead of discussing a project, let’s briefly take a look at an R Package I’ve recently discovered. Before we being let me just mention that I realize not everyone uses R or have even used it before, instead my focus here will be on the technology, innovation,…
The benefits of interdisciplinarity: residence time
The so-called residence time of a system is both an immensely useful and highly intuitive conception which provides a relevant timescale for processes. For example, the residence time of nutrients flowing into a pond would be the average ‘lifetime’ of the nutrients before being taking up by the pond creatures. If it is a small…
Analyzing YSI data through clustering
Update 10/13/15 – Minor improvements to code and an update to the latest findings. CTD data (conductivity, temperature and depth) from a YSI provides a quick and methodologically simple way to estimate the current water column state by, literally, dropping an instrument off the side of a boat. During each deployment the YSI records the…
The Future of R
On a day to day basis, I use the R programing language more than any other language (e.g Python, Java, Fortran, Matlab…), and there is a good reason for it: R excels at the sort of work I do. It has been extremely well suited to my modeling work, especially when going to analyze the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo: A Practical Introduction
Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation sounds, admittedly, like a method better left to professional practitioners and the like; but please don’t let the esoteric name fool you. MCMC, as we like to call is, is a powerful yet deceptively simple technique that can be useful in problems ranging throughout science and engineering. Since this promises…
Finalizing my research, the CCELIM model, in R
For the past 6 months I’ve been working on an inverse modeling project as a ‘starter’ graduate project, and today I am announcing that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. While there is certainly more work ahead, especially with regards to the manuscript, the model and the code are just…
Which Witch is Which
This post is an elaboration of an iRKernel Notebook which can be found at http://misc.tkelly.org/Which_Witch.html. For a previous article on the iPython Notebook, see here. Every programming language comes pre-packaged with certain basic functions, or methods, that are considered standard. These generally include methods for sorting objects, conversions between basic types (e.g. integer float string),…
Making R your own: Scripting & Tweeting
Previously I have spoken on the merits of the R programming language (here) and alluded to its place in my research (here)[1], so today I thought it was about time to share how I approach using R in my research. R–just like any other tool–needs to be leveraged in such a way that the use…
Optimizing R Code in my Model
Recently I have been talking a fair bit about my inverse modeling work, so now that it’s summer I finally have time to clean up the code base. Now that the code is working fairly well and offers all of the main features that I can think of, the goal is to get it running…
How Twitter Improved my Ecological Model
For a last couple weeks I’ve been working on a marine ecosystem model using a technique called Inverse Modeling(1)I’ll be sure to do a writeup on what Inverse Modeling is and what makes it interesting in the future.; and while there’s been lots of progress, I’m starting to get to the point where the model takes some…