Your voice on HKRUG

[Chung-hong Chan]

Dear all,

This group has been around for nearly a year. (I started this google group in Apr-18 last year) Actually, we have make some progress. We have 15 something members, most of them opted not to receive any e-mail from this group. We have some scanty discussion on R as well.

To reiterate, I am really a sloppy organizer / promoter. I want to know more about the fellow HKRUG's member. My question is, what can I, or we, do, to make this group more helpful and ultimately making this group more like a knowledge exchange platform (mainly for beginners) rather than a mere r-help clone. You will usually get better answer from r-help, BTW.

My questions are:

1. What do you really expected from HKRUG? e.g. you expect HKRUG a online-only group or with some face-to-face component in it.

2. How can we improve the HKRUG? e.g. You prefer facebook page/Google+ page rather than google groups...

3. What scare you about R?

Regards,

CH

[Geoff Chan]

CH....some thoughts

To speak for my filed (social scientist), there is just not much people using R......people may have heard of it but don't know where to start off

if someone could put up some links or more organized material for R101...it may help....RMB my supervisor once ask us to give tutorial on R...

if you have this material ready, I can forward this group for some social scientists (particularly RPG students in my filed)... they will have great interest to get to this

Can someone also put up example to do path analysis (SEM) using R too, my friends will have great interest on this.

G 

 

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[Chung-hong Chan]

There are zillion of R 101 tutorials online. Some free interactive intro R online courses as well, two example are

http://tryr.codeschool.com/

https://www.coursera.org/course/compdata

The problem is that RPG students expect R works automagically like SPSS (I think even the social sci or maybe public health RPG students will never write a single line of SPSS syntax) rather than a programming language like Python or C++. Most of the courses online posit R as the latter rather than the former. By looking at the online material will very likely to get lost.

These are the three materials that I referred to a lot when I was learning R as beginner 10 years ago:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Verzani-SimpleR.pdf

http://personality-project.org/r/

http://www.statmethods.net/ (Back in the day, this site is a lot uglier.)

It took me a year or two to appreciate the elegance of R. Back then, I wish we can have a usergroup or support group of some kind in Hong Kong so that I  learn from the seniors, rather than go through the painful process of panicking, puzzling and googling.

(For path analysis or SEM, I think the old blood will use sem package. But new blood will use lavaan. There is a R-Journal article about it.

http://www.jstatsoft.org/v48/i02/paper)

CH

[Sara Fung]

Thank you Hong for organizing it.  It is great and I hope the group flourish.  Not like you, after years of occasional use of R, I'm still like a beginner, thus I can't contribute much on the topic, but I support it as always.  I would also like to see some gatherings for the R users in the future. s

[Melody Lam]

First of all, thanks Hong for starting up this group.

1. What do you really expected from HKRUG? e.g. you expect HKRUG a online-only group or with some face-to-face component in it.

Prefer online-group first. I don't know what to discuss if we'll meet face-to-face.

2. How can we improve the HKRUG? e.g. You prefer facebook page/Google+ page rather than google groups...

no special preference. I am fine with the current google group. But I just wonder if using a facebook page with attract more student R users. (or actually any student R users in HK?)

3. What scare you about R?

Like Sara, I am an occasional user of R, so I am at the beginner's level too.I mainly use R in analysing biomedical data. Having e-newsletter on R usage regularly (once 3 or 6 months, don't need to be too frequent as I know everyone is busy) would be fine, but I'd afraid that some topics I find suitable for me would be too naive for advanced R users, while some other topics are too difficult for elementary users. 

Melody

P.S. the CEID at CUHK is organizing some compact course on using R. Here is the link for your reference:
https://sites.google.com/site/ceidcc2013/compactcourse

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[Sara Fung]

Dear Melody,

Thanks for sharing, I am definitely going to attend the R seminar.  As far as I know, this is the only open workshop so far and I hope to see more of that in the future. I am thinking if you are the researcher from CEID, could it be possible to make a remark of our group during the seminar? Or not, we may propose it to the host.  s

[Melody Lam]

Dear Sara,

I'm working in the faculty of medicine in CUHK but not in CEID. I am not sure if I can join this course or not as I am now working on other projects and not sure if I can share the time to join.
Anyway it's a good idea to propose to the host to mention this group ^_^

Regards,

Melody

[C.H.]

Thx Melody for the info and the comment. As far as I know, UG
statistical computing classes are mostly SAS or SPSS sales pitch. For
PG, I know HKU's Master of Public Health offers training in both SAS
and R. (and C++ for infectious disease modeling, so hardcore!) CUHK's
MSc Epidemiol and Biostat tried to teach R but the reception is not so
good. One BU stat course also offer training in R. Unlike the rapid
growth of R teaching in the mainstream Univs overseas, I don't think R
is tightly integrated into the HK curriculum. Your query is right,
there is not much student R users. Most R users are self-taught

https://sites.google.com/site/ceidcc2013/registration

$1600 is not cheap. Actually, our fellow Geoff have good experience in
TS analysis and have published a paper with TS analysis entirely done
by R. Maybe we should beg him to offer a clash course in TS for a
small fraction of the price and also a quarter of the length.