Posts

If you can’t tell from my last post, I’m trying to delineate watersheds for about 650 lakes. It’s not possible (er, I am unwilling) to do this by hand, so I need a way to do this programmatically.

I have a paper in the works that involves data for a few hundred lakes in Nova Scotia, for which I need catchment parameters. That’s a tall order! Automated catchment extraction is possible, but it helps to have a ballpark area to work with.

This week in random R tutorials…how to program a deck of cards as a vctrs class, using R6 to keep track of multiple player hands! It was inspired by the deck of cards tutorial in Hands On Programming with R, except this version is more about creating interfaces than about learning R programming.

Before we start, I have to warn you that this is probably the nerdiest thing you’re going to do all week. In fact, the only thing that is nerdier than you reading this is me writing it.

Ever since I got a primer on Bayesian statistics from Aaron McNeil in my Analysis of Biological Data course at Dalhousie, I’ve been Bayesian-curious. As an avid R user, the way to do Bayesian statistics (as far as I can tell) is Stan, “a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling and high-performance statistical computation”.

I’ve been curious about bathymetry ever since I was a kid, when I could often be found pouring over charts of Lake Champlain during family sailing vacations. Little did I know that two decades later I would be making some of those maps myself!

Us Canadians are going to be looking at a lot of election maps in the next few hours, so I thought I’d try to make a few! First, we need to download the Riding geography from open Canada (there is more extensive information on Elections and Ridings at the Library of Parliament website).

It’s come up a few times in my career working with lakes that I’ve been asked to visualize the results of a sonde-based sampling program. These programs (and the data collected by them) are common, and it’s easy to see why: taking a boat to one of the deeper places in a lake and recording the temperature, oxygen saturation, and pH from a multi-parameter sonde is a relatively easy and engaging way to collect data.

Driving this week I heard an excellent piece on the CBC’s The Current entitled Set up to fail: Why women still don’t win elections as often as men in Canada. I love data science journalism, and the piece made me curious about the dataset, which the interviewee indicated was “downloaded from the parliament website”.

For those of you wondering why I haven’t been tweeting and/or blogging about mud and lakes all summer, it’s because I had the incredible opportunity to spend the summer as an RStudio intern working with Hadley Wickham on ggplot2!