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Showing posts from May, 2014

Updates to repmis: caching downloaded data and Excel data downloading

Over the past few months I’ve added a few improvements to the repmis –miscellaneous functions for reproducible research–R package. I just want to briefly highlight two of them: Caching downloaded data sets. source_XlsxData for downloading data in Excel formatted files. Both of these capabilities are in repmis version 0.2.9 and greater. Caching When working with data sourced directly from the internet, it can be time consuming (and make the data hoster angry) to repeatedly download the data. So, repmis ’s source functions ( source_data , source_DropboxData , and source_XlsxData ) can now cache a downloaded data set by setting the argument cache = TRUE . For example: DisData <- source_data("http://bit.ly/156oQ7a", cache = TRUE) When the function is run again, the data set at http://bit.ly/156oQ7a will be loaded locally, rather than downloaded. To delete the cached data set, simply run the function again with the argument clearCache = TRUE . source_XlsxDat

d3Network Plays Nice with Shiny Web Apps

After some delay (and because of helpful prompting by Giles Heywood and code contributions by John Harrison ) d3Network now plays nicely with Shiny web apps . This means you can fully integrate R/D3.js network graphs into your web apps. Here is what one simple example looks like: An explanation of the code is here and you can download the app and play with it using: shiny::runGitHub('d3ShinyExample', 'christophergandrud')

European Parliament Candidates Have a Unique Opportunity to Advocate for Banking Union Transparency and Accountability

This is reposted from the original on the Hertie School of Governance European Elections blog . The discussion of issues around the European Parliament Elections has been beating around the bush for quite some time now. Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt famously described European Elections as ” second-order elections ”, in that they are secondary to national elections. A few weeks ago on this blog Andrea Römmele and Yann Lorenz argued that the current election cycle has been characterised by personality politics between candidates vying for the Commission presidency, rather than substantive issues. However, the election campaigns could be an important opportunity for the public to express their views on and even learn more about one of the defining changes to the European Union since the introduction of the Euro: the European Banking Union. Much of the framework for the Banking Union has been established in the past year after intense debate between the EU institutions . A ke