[R] sd in aggregate and help.search/?? seem not to work as usual in latest version

[Marvin Kiene]

Hello dear helpers,

I am currently running a small R-crash course for beginners at my
university, since I believe that there a far too few lectures about how to
use R.

Thereby, I showed the '??' or 'help.search()' function to the students as
well as the 'aggregate()' function with 'FUN=sd'.

 

The code worked fine for me - as usual (in version 3.5.1) - but not for the
students. Doing some research got me to the point, that in the current
version (3.6.0),

'aggregate' cannot use 'sd' for data.frames with mixed columns of factors
and numeric columns and throws an error (which is somewhat ok, since 'var()'
is not applicable for factors, of course)  instead of putting 'NA's into the
respective columns like it does with 'FUN=mean' and like it does in the
former version(s). 

Is this a bug or a feature? It would be nice to work with it, the way I am
used to. Of course it is not difficult to work around this problem, but it
is somewhat strange, why it was changed that way (if this was intended).

 

Additionally, the 'help.search()' always just gives the result: "No results
found", for all of my students.

 

I didn't find any post about that issues so far, so I am not sure whether
this are known issues (but all of my 10 students had this problem).

 

If this were intended changes, I would be interested, what the reason is and
whether there are direct workarounds (e.g. instead of using only numeric
columns), for those issues. 

Otherwise I am looking forward to a fixed version. 

 

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

Kind regards,

Marvin Kiene

 

Doctoral Student

Department of Animal Ecology I, AG Prof. Laforsch

University of Bayreuth

95440 Bayreuth

Germany

 


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]