Robert Walker Profile picture
Management School Professor-Quantitative Methods/Data Scientist, Dad, Arsenal fan, political economy, applied statistics, R. Personal account. (he/him/his)

Jun 5, 2021, 69 tweets

LiveThread of #cascadiaRConf afternoon session [with apologies to @tladeras for missing the first lightning talk; my dog needed food]. Now building a college basketball simulation by Kevin Floyd.

@reikookamoto1 lightning talk about bringing analysts and technical writers together through internal packages to support teams.
#cascadiaRConf

Understanding the teams needs, not just your own...
#cascadiaRConf

A theme of many of the talks is the need for development to market/show how the packages solve key problems.

Keisha R. Harrison on Defining Complex Microbial Systems within Kombucha Fermentations Using METACODER and PYHLOSEQ Libraries
or what's the biology of kombucha...
#cascadiaRConf

How cool...

Erin Dahl talks about microshades for color accessibility in complex data.

Types of color-vision deficiency (CVD)

Existing solutions have few colors. {microshades} expands from 8 colors to 30

An example: wow!

Jill Levine talking about the Clio package for clean historical data.

@jdlevine presents a visual derived from the data [clio.infra] on book titles

Next up, Dror Berel: Been there, done that. Practices I adopted from R that will guide me through learning additional programming languages

The path:

Augment your wheel, don't reinvent it.

@Edgar_Zamora_ talks about redesigning workflows

Overview:

It is a worthwhile investment:

Next is Asha Yadav: Data-Informed Decision Making in Part C Early Intervention using Shiny R

Evaluate an intervention and make the evaluation accessible.

Impact...

User-centered tools are key

Shiny empowers the users.

Accessibility is not just about colors and the like, familiarity too....

Howard Baek ( @howard_baek ) : Feedback Report: A Web-Based Shiny Dashboard for displaying Patient-Reported Outcome Measures for Patients in Addiction Treatment

Give decision makers useful tools. Empowerment.
#cascadiaRConf

A website in 5 minutes! Sean Kross ( @seankross ): Create a Personal Website in 5 Minutes with Postcards

Get an easy win, fill in that top left hand corner with a personal website built in *postcards*

The final lightning talk: Katie Jolly ( @katiejolly6 ): Designing graphics to post online: What I’ve learned from the (sometimes helpful) comments on my maps from Twitter and Reddit

Alternate title:

No truer statement has been written:

Exactly. What I think a graphic means applies, perfectly, TO ME!

Learn from coders by sharing code:

The lightning talk format and all the lightning talks were excellent. You really otter be at #cascadiaRConf

Using R Session begins with a talk from @JohannWindt The PlayerMakeR Pipeline - Using R across the data pipeline with the Vancouver Whitecaps Football Club, an example using wearable technology.

The wearable tech illustrated:

@JohannWindt presents an absolutely awesome schema for evaluating the cost-benefit of new instruments and sources of data

Esther Needham and Bryan Blanc: Using Shiny Dashboards to Understand Bus Transit Delay and Sketch Solutions for King County Metro Transit

Bus usage increased (as a % of transit ridership) under COVID...

An amazing shiny:

Evaluating interventions in a shiny.

Cordero Ortiz: PurpleAir PM2.5 Modeling in Portland, Oregon. Missed the title slide but here is what PM2.5 is.

The sensors

The sensor array in Portland

There's an R package for the sensors. Who knew?

Time series data too

There's a ton of data with a ton of layering! For R, no problem.....

A random forest to generate a predictive model.

All that data, all those models, shiny brings it together.

The Q&A with a focus on how to get the users to understand what is provided and for adapting or baselining to help them with data understanding.

The final session is Education & Community. Leading off is Kristin Bott talking about how they built community at Reed. Faculty have heterogeneous abilities and needs, students have more of both.

@RhoBott describes the team with a key need for emotional intelligence because it meets the needs where those needs are and building resources to enhance availability to encourage and empower.

People first, code second. A wonderful mantra.

Clear scoping is vital.

Waffle emojis

Njesa Totty: Validating the assumptions of bootstrap intervals for responsible implementation using the R package bootEd

Helping students to understand the underlying assumptions is key. So simulate it!

Nick Paterno: Teaching Non-STEM Students to Code will conclude the Education & Community session

Small colleges/universities covering a huge range of base conditions:

The talk appears to deploy Python indexing

Recounting the ubiquitous experience of intro stats instructors using R: the intersection of coding and stats and students not entirely connecting why each is non-ignorable.

Use `pkgdown` to minimize troubleshooting.

For many instructors, learning the language is important. That's true. But for students, using R as a tool to advance their needs is where the early value lies. Understanding the power of the tool can motivate that final step to the language as having intrinsic value.

Q&A

Moving to the concluding remarks, @ellis_hughes

Things Ellis learned

I cannot echo this enough! Thanks to all those whose hard work yielded an excellent conference!

Already looking forward to it.

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