manipulating information to solve environmental problems

• reproducible science: versioning (Git), collaborating (GitHub), and dynamic documents (Rmarkdown)
• data wrangling: reading (readr, readxl), transforming (dplyr, tidyr) and data type formatting (lubridate, stringr)
• programming: data types, flow control, functions, packages (devtools), documentation (roxygen2) and testing (testthat)
• visualization: static (ggplot2), interactive (htmlwidgets) and applications (shiny)

R packages

• Data scientists, according to interviews and expert estimates, spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in the mundane labor of collecting and preparing data, before it can be explored for useful information.

• Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era… 190,000 projected shortage in data scientists by 2018.

• [Data scientiests] responsible for a team of 1-3 earn [a median salary of] $140,000 and those responsible for a team of 10 or more earn $232,500. By contrast, the mean average annual income for a lawyer in America was $131,990 in 2013, while doctors earned $183,940.

There are a lot of great data science / R / environmental informatics community offerings in our area:

• Santa Barbara R Users Group: community R ~1x/qrtr

• Santa Barbara Data Science: community big data ~1x/qrtr

• Data Science at UCSB: UCSB undergraduate seminars ~2x/qrtr

• UCSB Data Science: UCSB graduate learning ~1x/2 wk

• Eco Data Science: Bren/NCEAS graduate learning ~3x/qrtr

• Software Carpentry Workshop: April 14-15th in UCSB Library Collaboratory 1x

• Less Git pain:
  • Github Desktop
  • New Assignment Github Workflow
  • URL of knitted HTML to GauchoSpace
• More website development with GitHub Pages:
  • Populate index.Rmd to render default index.html
  • Project websites (gh-pages branch) + personal (user.github.io) + organization (org.github.io)
  • Polished final project website (gh-pages branch) of R package having: wrangling + plotting functions + Shiny app embedded
• Install and use RStudio Server Pro + Shiny Server Pro FREE for teaching!

• Topics:
  • more/less of a given topic?
  • additional topics?
• Assignments:
  • mix of group vs individual?
  • depth vs breadth?
  • creative vs cookbook?
• Teaching:
  • format: 3 hr block vs multi-day?
  • stickies?
  • mix of lecture vs demo vs worktime?
  • online forum/issues/chat?