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We just released v0.2 of rnoaa. For details on the update, see the release notes. What follows are some notes on the more important changes. Updating to v0.2 Install rnoaa from CRAN install.packages("rnoaa") or Github devtools::install_github("ropensci/rnoaa") Then load rnoaa library("rnoaa") UI changes We changed almost all function names to have a more intuitive programmatic user interface (or UI). We changed all noaa*() functions to ncdc*() - these work only with NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data, so the ncdc name makes sense....
We’re delighted to announce that we have received additional funding from the Sloan Foundation to continue and expand our efforts from the past year. We’re grateful for the overwhelming support from the community, especially through engagement at various events we organized and attended this past year. Over the next year we plan to: advance not only the technical infrastructure for accessing, managing, and synthesizing large and heterogeneous data, but also the social infrastructure of research to facilitate collaboration and exchange of data, methods, and ideas so they can be easily reproduced and extended....
Science is reportedly in the middle of a reproducibility crisis. Reproducibility seems laudable and is frequently called for (e.g., nature and science). In general the argument is that research that can be independently reproduced is more reliable than research that cannot be independently reproduced. It is also worth noting that reproducing research is not solely a checking process, and it can provide useful jumping-off points for future research questions. It is difficult to find a counter-argument to these claims, but arguing that reproducibility is laudable in general glosses over the fact that for each research group it is a significant amount of work to make their research (easily) reproducible for independent scientists....
We just released v0.3 of taxize. For details on the update, see the release notes. Some new features New function iplant_resolve() to do name resolution using the iPlant name resolution service. Note, this is different from http://taxosaurus.org/ that is wrapped in the tnrs() function. New function ipni_search() to search for names in the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). See below for more. New function resolve() that unifies name resolution services from iPlant’s name resolution service (via iplant_resolve()), Taxosaurus’ TNRS (via tnrs()), and GNR’s name resolution service (via gnr_resolve())....
The rOpenSci project is a poster child for the fluid collaboration that has become increasingly common these days thanks to platforms like Twitter and GitHub. It has been really inspring to see open discussions take shape as rough ideas, which rapidly turn into prototype research software, all of which are now happening in the order of few days to weeks rather than months to years. The origins of this project itself lead back to a series of serendipitous conversations that occurred over Twitter three years ago....
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