Updated CV

Heyo! I am finally doing a blog post again - was able to update the site with my newest publications, several new packages, and presentations. Check out the research presentation page for updates on presentations given this year, including several workshops (with provided code). Packages: Buchanan, E. M. (2024). visualizemi: Visualization, Effect Size, and Replication of Measurement Invariance for Registered Reports. R package version 0.0.1. https://github.com/doomlab/visualizemi Buchanan, E. M. (2024). Visualizing Sensitivity. [Read More]

formr Round 3: No nginx Required

Alright folks! I am back with more installation guides. I’ve installed formr so many times at this point … since my first post, opencpu has updated to R 4+, and I’ve found a way to not use nginx. Which is good news, since it often conflicts with also running apache. I’m going to leave the old guides up because maybe they can help someone figure out their issues, but here goes with the newest guide. [Read More]

Installing RStudio Server + Updates

One of the most difficult things I try to teach my students is how to deal with error messages. Due to Hurricane Laura, I am currently re-creating several projects including formr, RStudio, and a website. I thought I would detail that here. You can find my first post on formr here: https://www.aggieerin.com/post/formr-installation-instructions/ Good news! It’s mostly the same and pretty smooth. However, I sometimes get this nonsense: installation of package ‘psych’ had non-zero exit status - any time you get the non-zero exit status message, it requires a careful look at the installation messages. [Read More]

formr Installation Instructions

An installation guide taken from formr documentation and modified to include more details for those who need it. These installation instructions are provided for Ubuntu 18.04; however, they could be modified for other systems. The original instructions suggest Debian 9, but I found this much easier on Ubuntu. I have now used both Digital Ocean and Amazon Lightsail for this installation. I don’t think the product matters, but the size of the machine is likely something you should focus on. [Read More]

Is English Kurtotic?

You ever have a random text that sent your brain to work? Here’s mine today: KD Text Followed up with examples that lol is bimodal, while loop is positively skewed, and enter is “almost normal”. The lovely K.D. posed this question to me earlier, and I already have procrastinated a lot today, so here’s to more! First, I typed out some fonts in Word to help me figure out how to code the two important parts for this question: width and height. [Read More]

Lasso Myself Numbers

Hey everybody! The last couple days I have been trying to learn LASSO regression, which stands for Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator. I have several datasets with many variables, and I thought these would be a good opportunity to learn about how to lasso, while maybe answering a few questions about words. Right, the part I forgot about is that I have repeated measures data, which always complicates things. [Read More]

The Year of the Thesis

The Year of the Thesis! Just wanted to highlight several publications from this year, which were mostly theses from some fabulous young researchers: Scofield, J.E., Kostic, B., & Buchanan, E.M. (2019). How the presence of others affects desirability judgments in heterosexual and homosexual participants. Archives of Sexual Behavior, X, XX–XX. doi: 10.1007/s10508-019-01516-w Maxwell, N.P. & Buchanan, E.M. (2019). Investigating the interaction of direct and indirect relation on memory judgments and retrieval. [Read More]

Getting Translations with rvest and Selenium

In this guide, I’ll go over how you can use web scraping rvest and Selenium to get translations from Google Translate. Note: I encourage responsible scraping - I always try to do it with some space between requests. You can only do 5000 characters at a time with the free Google translate. I will say that I tried to do this with just rvest and the predictability of the links for Google translate - but I could not get rvest to pull the right data off the page, so here’s a slightly more difficult approach that appears to work. [Read More]

New Publications

Just updated my CV - here’s a few new publications and conferences! The weird thing about the automatic CV updater I wrote is that you can’t really predict what order the same year publications are going to be in - not that it matters in general, but it’s an interesting side effect. Also, super proud - both of these are student theses turned papers: Maxwell, N.P. & Buchanan, E.M. (2019).Investigating the interaction of direct and in-direct relation on memory judgments and retrieval. [Read More]