A chance comment from a colleague led to today’s post. Competition for research grants in the UK has become more intense recently. Success rates have dropped, and this has been attributed to more applications, against a backdrop of a flat investment in science by the government. My colleague thought that the cost of each proposal […]
I wanted to know: After a little bit of searching, I couldn’t find any answers. So I decided to use R to retrieve the necessary info from Uniprot and calculate it myself. I thought I’d post it here in case it’s useful for others. Human We’ll start with the info I wanted. According to Uniprot […]
It’s often the way. I posted recently about how to pace a marathon and very quickly received feedback that would’ve improved the original post. Oh well, no going back. This is take two. So, we have a dataset of all runners from the 2025 New York City Marathon. We want to know how should you […]
I’ve posted about publication lag times previously. The “lag” refers to the time from submitting a paper and it appearing in a journal. Publication lag times are still a frustration for researchers. Although preprints circumvent the delay in sharing science with others, publication is still king when it comes to evaluation. Contracts are short and […]
How does the average marathoner pace their race? In this post, we’ll use R to have a look at a large dataset of marathon times to try to answer this question. The ideal strategy would be to “even split” the race. This is where you run continually at the same pace from kilometre 0 to […]
In a previous post, I described how to run a session to teach R to cell biologists. In this post we’ll look in a bit more detail at one of the steps: how to load data into R. As a reminder, a typical analysis task in cell biology follows these steps: Loading data into R […]
I saw a fun video on YouTube recently in which some runners attempted to do two parkruns in one day. I don’t mean run the same parkrun course twice, I mean they ran one parkrun at one course and then drove to a different course and ran that one too. The challenge was to do […]
In my previous post, I shared my annual running stats which were generated in R using summary data from Garmin Connect. The code I use to generate these summaries was beginning to get a bit unwieldy, so I have now rebased it into a package. GarminCSVr – is an R package to look at running […]
In this post I’ll use R to recap my running data from 2025. Previous round-ups are here (2021, 2022, 2023, not sure why I didn’t post one for 2024…). I had a goal of running a total distance of 3650 km in 2025. In truth, after running 3500 km in 2024, I decided to aim […]
I’m a music fan who is anti-streaming and instead I stubbornly maintain a large music collection. At this time of year, streamers receive a round-up of their year’s listening in a “wrapped” report. Not wanting to miss out, I set about rendering my own annual round-up using R! If you’d like to see a pick […]