I have an R cheat sheet, How Big Is Your Graph, that explains how to measure the size of various features of your graph in R. This blog post illustrates how you can use some of the commands described in that cheat sheet to rotate text to match a diagonal line in an R graph. It’s trickier than it seems. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: October 2016
PMean: Drawing the perfect circle
I have an R cheat sheet, How Big Is Your Graph, that explains how to measure the size of various features of your graph in R. This blog post illustrates how you can use some of the commands described in that cheat sheet to draw a perfect circle. Continue reading
PMean: Independent consulting and the cold call
There’s been some more discussion about getting started as an independent statistical consultant. One person is ready to hang their shingle and proposes to “find a niche I can serve, contact companies in that niche, etc.” but didn’t know what that niche might be. I had one cautionary comment and then discussed finding your niche. Continue reading
PMean: What do you hate most about independent consulting
Someone on the Statistical Consulting forum mentioned that she is going to become an independent consultant when she graduates and wanted to find out from people who are currently in that position what the one thing is that they hate most. This email drew a lot of responses including several people who cautioned this women about the difficulties for a young person to become an independent consultant. Here are the thoughts I shared on the thing I hate most and what the issues are with embarking out on your own as an independent consulting early in your career. Continue reading
PMean: Those darn commas in SQL
I should know better, but I made a rookie mistake with SQL that took a long time for me to fix. It’s one of those detail oriented things and if you aren’t detail oriented, you can’t call yourself a programmer. Continue reading
Recommended: Where Do You Run Your R Scripts?
I’m an experienced R programmer trying to learn a little about SQL. One of my good friends who lives totally in the database world (I call her the Teradata Queen), shared a link to a blog post at SQLServerCentral about using R. Microsoft is including R in its SQL Server distribution, so this is an opportunity for a lot of interesting work combining the data manipulation power of SQL Server with the data analysis power of R. Anyway, the blog post explains some of the cost and performance issues associated with R scripts running on a SQL Server CPU. Continue reading
Recommended: A Tutorial on Loops in R
This is a very clear, but also very detailed explanation of the for, while, and repeat loops along with the concept of vectorization. A great resource for beginners. Continue reading
Recommended: Oracle Dates and Times
I’m working with R and SQL, and some of the work uses SQLite, and some of the work uses Oracle. There are subtle differences between the two, and for that matter between any two database programs. While there are SQL standards, most packages have minor deviations, or enhancements. Dates in Oracle represent one deviation. In particular, Oracle does not use the ISO 8601 standard date format (yyyy-mm-dd) by default. Here’s a nice overview of how to work with Oracle dates. Continue reading
PMean: What greedy means to a geek
I’ve run across the term “greedy” in several work related contexts, so I thought it might be worth explaining what it means. Continue reading
PMean: One small grant for me, one giant leap for Biostatisticians
I’m so busy these days that it is silly to take on anything new, but I found an opportunity for a small research grant that I might want to submit a proposal for. Continue reading