The database clinicaltrials.gov is a web resource of clinical trials around the world. It has a REST API that gives access to clinical trial data. There are some resources available to interact with this resource using R, such as rclinicaltrials and ClinicalTrialsAPI. We were interested at looking clinical trials for rare diseases and particularly whether […]
Cluster One II: comparing cycling performance on similar courses
A short follow-up post. Previously, I looked at how to reproduce a Strava feature that compares performance over similar courses. With a few modifications to the code, I was able to analyse a much larger dataset of cycling performance on similar courses. Two courses with the highest number of tracks are shown below. I cycle […]
Cluster One: comparing running performance on similar courses
One of several features that Strava put behind a paywall was the ability to compare performance on similar courses. I miss this comparison tool and wondered how hard it would be to code my own. This post is a walkthrough of how I approached the problem. The code is available here. It uses the trackeR […]
Culture Move: new preprint on cell migration
We have a new preprint out. This is a short post to describe our findings and highlight some of the software I developed for analysing cell migration and cell shape data. Intracellular nanovesicles mediate integrin trafficking during cell migration bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2020.08.19.257287 It is mainly the work of Gabrielle Larocque with help from Penny La-Borde […]
Tips From The Blog XIII: siunitx, Helvetica and LaTeX
I searched several times in vain to solve this problem. After finding a solution, I thought i’d put it up here. The problem Formatting of units using siunitx in LaTeX does not match the typeface of the body text. We like to use the helvet package to get a close approximation to Helvetica in LaTeX. […]
Color Bars
Here is a fun post about using colour palettes in R. It starts with a computer game… After a few years of sporadically playing Super Mario World 2 – Yoshi’s Island on the Retropie, I made it to the final level. In the background, as Bowser approached, I noticed that those coloured bars in the […]
Represent: geographical breakdown of a virtual seminar series
During the pandemic, many virtual seminar programmes have popped up. One series, “Motors in Quarantine“, has been very successful. It’s organised by my colleagues Anne Straube, Alex Zwetsloot and Huong Vu. Anne wanted to know if attendees of the seminar series were a fair representation of the field. We know the geographical location of the […]
Talkshow: why don’t scientists do gigs?
The coronavirus crisis has meant that scientific meetings and seminars have moved online. This change has led to me wondering: why don’t scientists give talks the way that musicians do gigs? The idea is: after posting a preprint or publishing a paper, a scientist advertises that they will livestream a seminar to explain the work. […]
Running Free: Calculating Efficiency Factor in R
Joe Friel reposted an article earlier this year on Efficiency Factor in running. Efficiency Factor (EF) can be viewed in Training Peaks software and he describes how it is calculated. This post describes how I went about calculating EF in R using a single gpx file. What is Efficiency Factor (EF)? Essentially, EF is the […]
Say It Ain’t So: using Weezer album cover colours in R
I’m a long-term fan of Weezer. Such was the brilliance of their first two albums that I have stuck with them through thick and thin. And dear me, there has been some very thin music. Nonetheless I own every album – thirteen of them. Among them are six albums entitled “Weezer”. These records are colloquially […]