New primary site

tl;dr Visit https://jacintak.github.io for the latest from me. I know I just revamped this site but it was becoming increasingly clear that WordPress was insufficient to showcase my portfolio in a satisfactory way. I also did not like having two active websites so I decided to choose between my children. WordPress lost. After 5 years …

5 years of blogging

It's been 5 years… Since this website went live. In fact, with 2020 I didn't notice and it's even closer to 6 years now! To celebrate I gave the site a modern makeover so it doesn't look like it was stuck in the early 2010s. Let's look at some stats. Sadly WordPress doesn't let you …

An R package of learnr tutorials for R and biostats

tl;dr I made an R package called biostats.tutorials containing learnr tutorials on R and stats. Available on GitHub. Learning statistics and R has changed a lot since I started in undergrad and that wasn't that long ago. When I learnt it, it was basic. The lecturers chose not to use RStudio so we used the …

Measuring the mammalian diving reflex with Apple Watch

I like ecophysiology, data and R. This blog post is a niche intersection between those three interests and I like that. There are two functions of this post1 To try out the RWordPress package for publishing Rmarkdown directly to WordPress Since you are reading this, it worked! (Not really - images are troublesome, I had …

Links about teaching statistics for biologists

Updated 27/11/20 Teaching statistics has vastly improved from my undergraduate days (and that wasn't that long ago) in terms of accessible online material and pedagogy. As an undergraduate I would have appreciated some easy to follow readings that weren't technical replies on StackExchange. We teach introductory stats theory and coding in R to a general …

Online resources for teaching zoology

We're pretty spoilt for zoology teaching resources at Trinity College Dublin. That's because we have a quite complete teaching collection in our zoology museum. A superfluous resource for universities in modern times or a relict of imperialism? That's not important now. What's important is that our collection is in integral part of our teaching program …

A workaround for group labels on faceted ggplots

I recently had to beautify some figures for a publication.  The graph in question was a faceted plot made using the standard ggplot2 function facet_grid(). I prefer to do all my graph editing in R rather than a vector image software and facet_grid() and its partner facet_wrap() are useful functions for presenting graphs of factors …

Using icons with rmarkdown

Last year, I added icons to my GitHub website. I built that website in R using the static site generator in the rmarkdown package but I hadn't thought to include icons when I taught myself how to make a website. Icons are freely available from different open source icon websites. rmarkdown supports three of them …

2019 retrospective

As the year draws to a close and my calendar is looking a little freer, now seems like a good time to look back on the year. 2019 was a big year for me. In order of achievement: I applied for, interviewed and got a job I went to the Victorian Biodiversity Conference I did …

R colour packages

Themed colour palettes for R are really popular at the moment. The popularity of these project packages is unsurprising. It's the perfect blend of the geekiness of pop culture and the nerdiness of coding. There are palettes for Game of Thrones, Wes Andersen movies, cities, national parks in the US, Studio Ghibli movies, birds & …