Organic and Inorganic Chemistry Lesson of the Day – Stereoisomers

Two molecules are stereoisomers if they

• have the same molecular formula
• have the same sequence of bonds between each molecule’s constituent atoms
• have different 3-dimensional (spatial or geometric) orientations of the constituent atoms

Examples of stereoisomers include

• enantiomers
• diastereomers
• meso isomer
• cis/trans isomers

It is important to emphasize that stereoisomers are defined for 2 or more molecules.  Consider 3 isomers, A, B and C.

• A and B may be stereoisomers.
• A and C may not be stereoisomers.  They may be structural isomers, which have the same atoms but different sequences of bonds.

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Calculating the sum or mean of a numeric (continuous) variable by a group (categorical) variable in SAS

Introduction

A common task in data analysis and statistics is to calculate the sum or mean of a continuous variable.  If that variable can be categorized into 2 or more classes, you may want to get the sum or mean for each class.

This sounds like a simple task, yet I took a surprisingly long time to learn how to do this in SAS and get exactly what I want – a new data with with each category as the identifier and the calculated sum/mean as the value of a second variable.  Here is an example to show you how to do it using PROC MEANS.

Read more to see an example data set and get the SAS code to calculate the sum or mean of a continuous variable by a categorical variable!

Visual index of plots and corresponding R scripts

Dear Readers of The Chemical Statistician,

Joanna Zhao, an undergraduate researcher in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, produced a visual index of over 100 plots using ggplot2, the R package written by Hadley Wickham.

An example of a plot and its source R code on Joanna Zhao’s catalog.

Click on a thumbnail of any picture in this catalog – you will see the figure AND all of the necessary code to reproduce it.  These plots are from Naomi Robbins‘ book “Creating More Effective Graphs”.

If you

• want to produce an effective plot in R
• roughly know what the plot should look like
• but could really use an example to get started,

then this is a great resource for you!  A related GitHub repository has the code for ALL figures and the infrastructure for Joanna’s Shiny app.

I learned about this resource while working in my job at the British Columbia Cancer Agency; I am fortunate to attend a wonderful seminar series on statistics at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, and a colleague from this seminar told me about it.  By sharing this with you, I hope that it will immensely help you with your data visualization needs!