Archive 2018

My first experience with blogdown

Published at November 15, 2018 ·  1 min read

This is my first day at work with blogdown. I must admit it is pretty overwhelming at the beginning … I thought that it might be useful to write down a few notes, to summarise my steps ahead, during the learning process. I do not work with blogdown everyday and I tend to forget things quite easily. Therefore, these notes may help me recap how far I have come. And they might also help other beginners, to speed up their initial steps with such a powerful blogging platform....


My learning path with blogdown

Published at November 15, 2018 ·  6 min read

This is my first day at work with blogdown. I must admit it is pretty overwhelming at the beginning … I worked with R Studio and installed the library ‘blogdown’. I followed the instructions and used the ‘NEW PROJECT’ menu and added a ‘NEW BLOGDOWN SITE’ to my file system. I selected the ‘hugo-blog-jeffprod’ theme. This created a bunch of directories in my working directory. If I use the ‘serve_site()’ function in console, the Hugo server is called and the site is continuously updated, as soon as I make changes and save them....


Sample variance and population variance: which of the two?

Published at November 9, 2018 ·  7 min read

Teaching experimental methodology in agriculture related master courses poses some peculiar problems. One of these is to explain the difference between sample variance and population variance. For the students it is usually easy to grasp the idea that, being the mean the ‘center’ of the dataset, it is relevant to measure the average distance to the mean for all individuals in the dataset. Of course, we need to take the sum of squared distances, otherwise negative and positive residuals cancel each other out....