[OGRUG] Fwd: INVITATION - Research Challenges Seminar Series presents John Nash on Friday, November 23, 2012

[Prof J C Nash (U30A)]

R-UG members may find this interesting, since it uses 
Sweave/knitr/odfWeave. Email Caroline if you'd like to attend.

JN

INVITATION - Research Challenges Seminar Series presents John Nash on 
Friday, November 23, 2012

Location: DMS 6160

When: Fri 23 Nov 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Organizer: Faucher, Caroline <Faucher at telfer.uottawa.ca>

  The Research Challenges Seminar Series invites you to a presentation 
given by John Nash, Assistant Professor at the Telfer School of 
Management. His presentation entitled Open-Source Tools for Sensible 
Report Updates will be held on: Friday, November 23, 2012 11:00 to 12:00 
Telfer School of Management Desmarais Building DMS 6160 RSVP by 
Thursday, November 22, 2012 to Caroline Faucher 
(faucher at telfer.uOttawa.ca<mailto:faucher at telfer.uOttawa.ca> or 
613-562-5800 extension 2986). Please note that there is limited seating 
available. The objective of the Research Challenges Seminar Series is to 
assist researchers in dealing with obstacles and questions that have 
arisen over the course of their research by offering a supportive, 
constructive environment to discuss their “work in progress”. These 
presentations will allow researchers to benefit from the input and 
experience of their colleagues, while sharing their ongoing work with 
the seminar participants.

Abstract

This talk will introduce tools for automatically generating reports and 
graphs that need updating, such as quarterly
budget/accounts, annual reports, or evolving graphs of measurements or 
statistics. The need to reduce onerous mouse or
pointer operations and to avoid cut‐and‐past errors has been part of the 
motivation of the Microsoft OLE framework and
similar ventures, but these approaches are complex and only work on one 
platform, so work is difficult to share. As a way
to counter this, several tools have been developed, originally so 
important studies (clinical trials of drugs, for example)
could be sure the report contained exactly the results it should, and 
could be revised properly as new patient data arrived.
These relatively new tools, which come out of the “Reproducible 
Research” effort of the R Project for Statistical
Computing, are cross‐platform, very powerful, and can be used 
collaboratively. They have evolved to have utility far
beyond the scope of R. During the session, Dr. Nash will demonstrate how 
these tools can be used to prepare
collaborative academic papers and books and show how they can do a 
better job of getting calculations and graphs
updated in a way that vastly reduces the “busy work” leading to the 
final product.