Author: Luke Miller
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Early Open Wave Height Logger battery tests
Following on the previous post about the Open Wave Height Logger project, I’ve been conducting a simple battery life test. One of the prototype OWHLs was powered by a 3 D-cell alkaline battery pack and shoved in the freezer for 32 days. The image below shows the collated daily data files for that time period,…
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Open Wave Height Logger
OWHL – The Open Wave Height Logger OWHL is a project originally dreamed up by Jarrett Byrnes and Ted Lyman at UMass Boston. Early on they contacted me for my thoughts on how to accomplish the goal of making a cheap, long-life pressure sensor data logger that could be used to record ocean wave heights…
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Lizards
Smug looking lizards. They seem awfully contented.
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Thomson Reuters Web of Science is still using OCR text recognition for new citations?
A co-author emailed me the other day to point out that somehow my name had been misspelled in the Web of Science citation database on our recent paper in Ecological Applications. The Web of Science listing has my first name listed as “Luice”, which judging by the name of this here website, isn’t how you…
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Arduino code for MS5803 pressure sensors
I have recently been developing a library for the Measurement Specialties MS5803 line of digital pressure sensors. These sensors are available in several different pressure ranges from 1 to 30 bar, they are submersible if installed in a proper housing, they communicate via I2C or SPI, and they cost around US$35. It’s fairly straightforward to…
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NOAA OISST v2 High Resolution daily sea surface temperatures with R
Update, 2015-11-30 It appears that NOAA has gone through and upgraded all of the OISST files to the newer version of the NetCDF file format. As a result, the functions outlined in this post don’t work any longer. Instead, see the updated functions in my newer post, https://lukemiller.org/index.php/2014/11/extracting-noaa-sea-surface-temperatures-with-ncdf4/. The concepts are the same as described…
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Part 2: Make your R figures legible in Powerpoint/Keynote presentations
In the previous post, I outlined some tips for increasing the size of figure labels for figures that are meant to be displayed on a projector. The previous post used the base R plot() function, but the procedure when plotting with ggplot2 is different and usually quite a bit simpler than the stock R plotting…
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Make your R figures legible in Powerpoint/Keynote presentations
Having just returned from the SICB 2014 meetings, the appearance of many people’s Powerpoint figures is fresh on my mind. The sheer number of tiny figure labels (tick marks, axis titles, legend text etc) is disappointing. If we want to point fingers, MATLAB users are clearly the worst offenders because of the microscopic default label…
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Seastar wasting syndrome
2013 is turning out to be a bad year for seastars (starfish) along the west coast of North America. As documented by this UC Santa Cruz monitoring webpage, a wasting disease of unknown origin (possibly caused by bacteria or a virus) is causing seastars of several species to fall apart. The map provided by the…
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Measuring respiration rates
Here’s what the last month of my life was like. This video shows the process of measuring limpet respiration using a fluorescence-based oxygen measuring system and a custom-built 15-well respiration chamber. The water bath maintains the desired temperature, and the user’s only job is to sit there and move the fiber optic probe to each…