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Jeremy Chacon

Jeremy has a PhD in Entomology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

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Articles by Jeremy Chacon

My 10 Favorite R Packages and the Cool Things You Can Do with Them

My 10 Favorite R Packages and the Cool Things You Can Do with Them

By Jeremy Chacon | February 2, 2015

One of the best parts of R is how extensible it is. Over the years, the community has put together hundreds (thousands?) of amazing packages to make your workflow easier. The downside of this wealth is that it can be hard to find packages that do exactly what you want! Therefore, I’ve put together a…

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Making Pretty Plots With ggplot

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Making Pretty Plots With ggplot

By Jeremy Chacon | July 30, 2014

The thing that was most difficult for me as an R beginner was plotting graphs with error bars – there is no concise way to do this with base graphics. There are workarounds, often using the ‘arrows’ command, but isn’t there a simpler way? Yes, in fact there are a handful of plotting packages for…

R You Ready? Using R for Statistical Tests

R You Ready? Using R for Statistical Tests

By Jeremy Chacon | June 16, 2014

We’ve been slowly coaxing you along in our R tutorials.  We’ve introduced what R is, gave you a basic tutorial into how to use R and also spent some time learning how to explore your data with R. By now you are probably itching to use R for more complicated analyses.  To indulge you, I…

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Exploratory Data Analysis

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Exploratory Data Analysis

By Jeremy Chacon | April 21, 2014

As you’ve probably kind of guessed from our previous articles Introducng R and the Basic R Tutorial, we think R programming language and R-studio are great tools for data analysis and figure production.  And now we are about to prove it! So, you’ve collected some data and are pretty sure you know what statistical test…

The lac Operon as a Microscopy Tool

The lac Operon as a Microscopy Tool

By Jeremy Chacon | January 8, 2014

The lac operon is an amazing tool in molecular biology.  It has been used for decades to turn on protein expression in an inducible manner with IPTG. The result is synthesis of vast amounts of protein to be used as you wish. While the lac operon is an amazing tool for protein production, it is…

Show Us Your Moves: Making an MSD Plot

Show Us Your Moves: Making an MSD Plot

By Jeremy Chacon | November 6, 2013

In the previous article, I showed you how to interpret mean-squared displacement (MSD) and showed four easy things you can learn from an MSD graph at a quick glance. Now let’s turn from analyzing an MSD plot to making one. I am going to use the programming language R to generate simulated data and then…

How Does it Move? Interpreting Motion of an Object with the Mean-Squared Displacement

By Jeremy Chacon | October 28, 2013

Stuff moves. It is useful to study how stuff moves, because motion analysis can tell us a lot about the object that is moving. For example, we can learn if an object’s motion is aimless, diffusive wandering, or directed towards some goal, free to explore the available environment, or restricted to a confined space. Studying…

R script

An Easy Way to Start Using R in Your Research: Basic Tutorial

By Jeremy Chacon | August 14, 2013

So now you’re convinced that R is the language for you, you’ve downloaded R-Studio (from https://www.rstudio.com/) and opened it, and. . .what the hell do you do now? Great question! I always find it easiest to learn by doing something, rather than just by seeing a list of possibilities, so here I’ll walk you through…

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