Reshaping the IT world

During my university time I worked on the IT help desk for a while. One day I received a call from a professor, who said that his printer had stopped working. So I asked him, if there was a message on the display and if he could read it to me. "Oh yes", he said, "it says: 'Load A4 paper.'"

Rachel King quotes a study by Cisco on ZDnet, which believes to have found out that college students and young employees under the age of 30 would rather take a lower salary than having no social media freedom, device flexibility and work mobility.

It feels like the 1960's in a lot of offices and IT departments of today. A younger generation is demanding more freedom and fun. It just not called rock music, mini skirts or of course the anti baby pill, which the generation of my professor was fighting for. That's all established now. It is the digital equivalent of those rights and I can understand that IT departments are concerned about this.

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The reshape function

The other day I wrote about the R functions by, apply and friends, which allow me to operate on subsets of data. All those functions work nicely, if the data is given in the right format. More often than not it isn't and I have to reshape the data beforehand. Thus, time to discuss the reshape function. I will focus on the reshape function in base R, and not the package of the same name.

I use Fischer's iris data set again, as it is readily available after starting R. The iris data set has 150 observation and the first 6 rows look like this:

head(iris)
  Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa

I would like to create a box whisker plot, showing the measurements of the observations for each of the species, as in the chart below.

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