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Jump to: LaTeX & Sweave // Sudo etc. // Grants // Writing

 

R

Quick-R, one of the friendliest R places on the web, with many handy things including a reminder of what all those graphical parameter codes lead to.

UCLA provides a nice breakdown of repeated-measures ANOVA here. And they have list of more R resources.

One R tip a day.

Matlab users, a couple translations.

Search engine specific for R.

Refcard for R.

R and your Mac, a big bunch of stuff from cran.

My book to live by is Venables & Ripley's Modern Applied Statistics.

GLMM wiki, with a focus on lme and lme4 in R.

Types of sums of squares: Make sure you know which you're using, want type III? Try the car package or check out your options(contrasts) or magically always have a perfectly balanced design. Also consider why you want which type you want.

Switching a column from factor to numeric? Be sure to ask for as.numeric(as.character(myfactorcolumn)) when you do.

Annoyed that lmer doesn't have p-values? Read this.

LaTeX & Sweave

Detexify: By far the most brilliant resource, draw your symbol and code options come up.

LaTeX and Sweave: Eli Holmes' workshop on LaTeX: Super easy friendly and useful directions to get LaTeX running on your machine -- and then get Sweave running, with some basic instructions for getting your coding life in LaTex and Sweave going. Start with "files to download" and get the Sweave files. Then work through the Sweave files under the tabs, set-up, lecture, and exercises.

LaTeX wikibook: So many of your questions answered in one place.

Nice and short, a refcard for LaTeX.

And a not-so-short intro to LaTeX.

Sweave: Once you have it installed and know LaTeX and R, there's not much to it, but here's the manual of which I know.

Tex gallery of images

BibDesk: If you use LaTeX and you have references, then you'll use BibTex. I use BibDesk to manage my BibTex stuff.

LaTeX to rtf: Small, simple and sweet, just install yourself and call latex2rtf "myfilepath" at the command line.

Beamer! Now that you know LaTeX you can start making all your presentations in Beamer and start making animated pdfs.

Word to LaTeX: Great little tool to export Open Office docs to LaTeX. Just download the program, then in Open Office, go to Tools -> Extension Manager and add the new extension (.oxt) and poof! Like magic you can now export all your docs to LaTeX. I will say that it is UGLY code, but it's good to get you started. You can open a new tex doc and pull out the good chunks.

White space in LaTeX: LaTeX's formatting is so lovely that initially you wonder why anyone would mess with it, and then a grant is due and you're looking for every trick in the book. You can still get a lot of the pretty and trim space by using a slew of tricks including using smaller font in the main text and refs, and some of these tricks including trimming that linespread, and then if you're still desperate check out what the engineers at Cambridge or the general UK TeX folks suggest. Happy page limiting.

Cleaning up intermediate files: When compiling your code LaTeX vomits up a bunch of ugly intermediate files. There's lots of ways to get rid of them, for emacs AucTex will allow you toss them. After compiling use the command (after C-c C-c) 'Clean' to toss them or 'Clean All' to toss them plus the output files. You can also customize disposal however you like (for example, don't trash them, put them somewhere you define etc.).

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Sudo, etc.

My favorite text editor is Aquamacs. I use it for R, LaTeX and most other stuff.

When make won't work remember sudo.

Maxima: open-source symbolic math program (what I use to solve the nastier equations).

Sage: another open-source math program (I want to try this someday).

Version control (such as Subversion or Git) so you can keep track of versions of all your files, works especially well with code.

Project management software to help you keep track of all your work (such as redmine).

 

Grants

Graduate-level: Cornell's database

Graduate-level: EPA STAR program

Graduate-level: NSF's "predoc" program, Graduate Research Fellowship program

Graduate-level: NASA's Graduate Student Researcher's program (GSRP)

Miscellaneous: Center for Invasive Plant Management's info

Postdoc: NSF's Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology

Postdoc: NSF's International Fellowship program

Postdoc: Miller Fellowship program at UC-Berkeley

Postdoc: UC Presidents Fellowship Program

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Writing

I spent a lot of time during my dissertation procrastinating about writing by reading about writing. Some of my favorites from this period are:

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul Silvia is probably the best because you can't spend too long reading it but it lays out all the rules (which are: to write a lot, you need to sit down and write, regularly). Also, maybe start an agraphia group.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-fiction by William Zissner is just a beautiful book, with all sorts of fantastic and depressingly simple advice, written so well that you can re-read it many times.

Stuff by Robert Boice is also good, such as the writing section of Advice for New Faculty Members, it shows some graphs in case you still want to believe spontaneous writers write better.

Made to Stick by the Heath brothers is not written as well as I would like, but all the points are valid and not put together so well anywhere else (that I am aware of).

Of course there's always Wiliiams' Style: Lessons in Clarity & Grace (and the much smaller 'Basics' edition, often excellent for students) and the Chicago Manual of Style for arguments about whether you can capitalize a word after a semi-colon, plus they have a Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations that is handy.

Loehle's classic on creativity in science compares your ideas to a zoo of animals, in a very good way.

Ms. Mentor gives generally good, realistic advice.

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Just to review: Your options are to visit Home, Data or Publications or Research which includes my work on Phenology, Detritus and other projects, Teaching, including an overview of my experience and my current undergrad’s blog on our bioinformatics work, you're at my Resources page with my links to favorite LaTex, Sweave and R help sites, a Grants list and Writing, and the almighty leftover stuff at Other. You can download my CV here.