I wanted to use the TwitteR package for R since a long time, I tried but didn’t do much of it. Today I found a few minutes, followed simple recipes (I admit), and looked at the number of tweets about flu today (November 13, 2018). Result: 283 tweets in English (I wanted to focus on the USA but, for some reason, I couldn’t … yet!). That’s not a lot. But remember we are only at the beginning of the influenza season 2018-2019 in the Northern hemisphere. ...
After a bit less than 2 hours, jepsfitbitapp retrieved my sleep data from Fitbit for the whole 2013 ( read previous post for the why (*)). Since this dataset covers the period I didn’t have a tracking device and, more broadly, I always slept at least a little bit at night, I removed all data point where it indicates I didn’t sleep. So I slept 5 hours and 37 minutes on average in 2013 with one very short night of 92 minutes and one very nice night of 12 hours and 44 minutes. Fitbits devices do not detect when you go to sleep and when you wake up: you have to tell tem (for instance by tapping 5 times on the Flex) that you go to sleep or you wake up (by the way this is a very clever way to use the Flex that has no button). Once told you are in bed the Flex manages to determine the number of minutes to fall asleep, after wakeup, asleep, awake, … The duration mentioned here is the real duration the Fitbit device considers I sleep (variable minutesAsleep). ...
After previous posts playing with Fitbit API ( part 1, part 2) I stumbled upon something a bit harder for sleep … Previous data belong to the “activities” category. In this category it is easy to get data about a specific activity over several days in one request. All parameters related to sleep are not in the same category and I couldn’t find a way to get all the sleep durations (for instance) in one query (*). So I updated the code to requests all sleep parameters for each and every day of 2013 … and I hit the limit of 150 requests per hours. ...
2013 is near its end and it’s time to see what happened during the last 360 days or so. Many things happened (graduated from MBA, new house, holidays, ill a few days, …) but I wanted to know if one could quantify these changes and how these changes would impact my daily physical activity. For that purpose I bought a Fitbit One in March 2013. I chose Fitbit over other devices available because of the price (99 USD at the time) and because it was available in Europe (via a Dutch vendor). At that time the Jawbone Up was unavailable (even in the USA) and the Nike Fuelband couldn’t track my sleep. ...
I was trying to reproduce the map of the GAVI Alliance eligible countries (btw I was surprised India is eligible - but that’s the beauty of relying on numbers only and not assumptions) in R. This is the original map (there are 57 countries eligible): I started to use the R package rworldmap because it seemed the most appropriate for this task. Everything went fine. Most of the time was spent converting the list of countries from plain English to plain “ISO3” code as required (ISO3 is in fact ISO 3166-1 alpha-3). I took my source from Wikipedia. ...
A few posts ago I wrote about my discomfort about stacked bar graphs and the fact I prefer to use simple table with gradients as background. My only regret then was that the table was built in a spreadsheet. I would have liked to keep the data as it is but also have a nice representation of these categorical data. This evening I spent some time analysing results from a survey and took the opportunity to buid these representations in R. ...
R is a " a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics". Being a desktop software, R is working out-of-the-box, even if you don’t have a network connection. However, if you want to install packages using a repository on the internet, you need a network connection (of course). If your computer happens to be behind a proxy server, you have to slightly modify your shortcut (in MS-Windows) to allow R to download packages. This can be done by modifying the “Target” field in the “Shortcut” tab of the shortcut properties (right-click on the shortcut to R, select tab “Shortcut”, edit field “Target”): ...