Even on a nice sunny morning, 15 Coding Gracers came along to our Taste of R workshop.

Here are some workshop files from the day: https://bitbucket.org/codinggrace/a-taste-of-r/src

The following package was mentioned (on the whiteboard): ggplot2 (by Hadley Wickham)

George Boole, an English man, a well-known mathematician at Queen's College in Cork, and inventor of the Boolean logic was mentioned when Kevin was explaining about true and false.

Some set theory was covered but probability was the theme of the day.

Risk lab at the Science Gallery was also mentioned and recommended a visit.

Here are a few notes while I was there.

Examining data sets - class to try the commands for

mtcarsdescribe(mtcars)

Get an error, so use command install.packages(“psych”)

A CRAN mirror dialog appears, select Ireland (HEANet), Internet connection required.

After it successfully installed but if there is a problem, it could be because it assumes that you are downloading the latest pkg for that latest version of R. Just remember to keep R up-to-date.

Run describe and still doesn't run, you need to specify where the command is coming from (like import), need to run library(psych)
Running describe again it should work.

Check out SocialSciences on CRAN-r; find psych to see its own reference manual and vignette.

Use sample() to get random data from a data set, it's just resample again.

Another mention of Risk Lab which refers to the game show door problem where 3 doors are presented to a contestant, they pick one door, the show host opens a door to a goat. There's one door left, do they want to switch door to win the big prize or stick with the door they picked. Marilyn vos Savant presented an argument to stick which caused furore when it was published in Parade Magazine, almost 10,000 letters were written in saying she was wrong and 1,000 of those letters were signed off by PhD signatures.

And finally a video of Grace Hopper's explanation of nanoseconds, which I found is a favourite to many I've shown it to so far. :-)

The workshop ended on time, and everyone seemed to be positive and I'm sure we have some R converts.

Wrap up slides - https://speakerdeck.com/whykay/coding-grace-r-workshop-1-wrap-up

A big thanks to Kevin, everyone who took part, and of course to our host, College of Computer Training (CCT).