10 February 2015 - Many people use Surveymonkey to conduct online surveys. You can get standard pdf reports of your data, but often you’ll want to do some more analysis or have more control over the design of the charts. An obvious option is to read the data into R. But there’s a practical problem: Surveymonkey uses the second row of it’s output file for answer categories and puts some other information in that row as well. This has the additional effect that R will treat numerical variables as factors.

10 February 2015 - With the help of posts by Hillary Parker and trestletech I managed to create my first R package in RStudio (here’s why) . It wasn’t as difficult as I thought and it seems to work. Below is a basic step-by-step description of how I did it (this assumes you have one or more R functions to include in your package, preferably in separate R-script files):

2 January 2015 - There’s certainly some bland stuff around, but many sevillanas are explosive and raw. In fact, sevillanas are the punk of Spanish music. I analysed Discogs and Spotify data to back this up.

24 October 2014 - Minister Schultz wants to allow Amsterdam to ban scooters from cycle paths and make them use the road, wearing a helmet. This should make cycle paths safer for cyclists and reduce their exposure to air pollution. However, car and scooter lobbyists argue that the speed difference between scooters and cars is too large for scooters to ride safely on the road, with motorists driving 50 kmph.

10 September 2014 - On 18 September, Scotland may vote for independence. My understanding is that the referendum isn’t necessarily about kilts and haggis, but rather about left-leaning Scots who are fed up with London’s neoliberal policies. Policies that have caused, among other things, a widening gap between the rich and the rest of society. In fact, the Scottish referendum has been called the «world’s first vote on economic inequality».