Grepping PowerPoint files

Last updated: 2023/03/07 I’m not really a fan of PowerPoint but it’s ubiquitous in research, so I have to work with them. Sometimes I need to find a slide amongst a pile of PowerPoint files and waste a lot of time opening and closing files. I wondered whether I could grep PowerPoint files and sure…

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On blogging

When I was an honours student (in Australia an honours degree is a one year [in practice, it’s about ten months] undergraduate research program you can take after your Bachelor’s and has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of the word “honours”), I literally jumped into the deep end of bioinformatics. I recall joining…

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On learning

Sometime in the past this blog was called “Musings from a PhD candidate”, despite hardly writing any blog posts that were of the contemplative sort. It later evolved to “Musings from an unlikely candidate” because I had received my PhD, which I thought was quite an unlikely event given my background. However, this carried a…

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Plotting weather data using R

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology provides historical weather data, some of which can be freely downloaded. In this blog post, I will plot the weather data collected at two weather stations in Brisbane: the Brisbane Regional Office weather station (latitude 27.466 degrees south, longitude 153.0270 degrees east, and elevation of 38 metres) with data available…

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Solving problems with graphs

I saw this question on Quora: A teacher assigns each of her 18 students a different integer from 1 through 18. The teacher forms pairs of study partners by using the rule that the sum of the pair of numbers is a perfect square. Assuming the 9 pairs of students follow this rule, the student…

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Learning R through a mini game part 3

This is my third post on learning R through the BetaBit package, which contains three mini games for learning R. I wrote about the first game, called proton, late last year and the second game, called frequon, a week and a half ago. The third game is called regression and it’s much more statistical than…

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Learning R through a mini game part 2

Late last year I discovered proton, an educational game in R about processing data frames, via R-bloggers and had a go at it. I thought it was fun and educational; it was also the first time I tried to use the dplyr package. I recently learned that there are two more games produced by the…

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What do I use?

Almost two years ago, I found this Q&A series on Biostars that asks well-known bioinformaticians what tools they use for their work: This is a nice Q&A series on @BioStarQuestion that shows what some known bioinformaticians use https://t.co/CYIiNJiLiF #bioinformatics — Dave Tang (@davetang31) October 10, 2014 The questions asked were: What hardware do you use?…

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Less blogging, more GitHub repositories

Another two months have gone by without any new blog posts; I’ve just been occupied with various other tasks: I don't how people juggle between writing grants, reviewing grants, writing papers, and doing actual sciency stuff #struggling — Dave Tang (@davetang31) May 10, 2016

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2015 WordPress report

Well it’s the last day of the year; as a tradition I started last year, here’s my WordPress Annual Report. Compared to last year, I’ve got slightly more visitors (250,000 -> 280,000) from slightly more countries (184 -> 191) per annum. See you next year!

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