22 February 2011

All about R

I'm an evolutionary biologist. Right now I happen to work on genomes, and I really like the way the world looks from this corner of biology. These days, though, evolutionary genomics involves lots and lots of bioinformatics and computation, so I'm gradually honing my skills in Terminal, on servers, etc (I'm a Mac girl).

My latest obsession is R, which happens to have a ton of awesome packages for evolutionary analysis. I was lucky enough to be featured on my friends' blog, Teaching My Wife R. I'm Princess Trad! I'm almost useful! I'm learning AND teaching, hooray! If you're even more of a glutton for punishment, you can also check out some of the cutting edge development in evolutionary analysis in R.

2 comments:

Eli said...

Ahhhh R. A wonderful tool and a huge pain all at the same time. :D Fair warning: if you do any custom programming R can occasionally suck at recursion through arrays. If you're using a package then intensive subroutines should have been written in C or Fortran for speed. But don't be surprised if you get the bug to write something and the loops are HIDEOUSLY slow.

Unknown said...

Eli, this is really great to know...I am noting this for future reference!