Learning to graph our data in R

The past week has been pretty calm - I haven't been in the lab at all, and we've been waiting for our samples to run and then analyzing the data. Today we finally had our complete data set, so Sarah and I worked on processing some of it in R and graphing it. Hopefully early next week we'll be able to meet with Scott (the PI, or Primary (faculty) Investigator).

In the meantime, I learned how to do some simple data analysis, check correlations, run regressions, and plot some simple graphs! I've only taken one coding class (this past spring), but it was fun to apply some of what I learned there to a completely different kind of project. Here's some of what we worked on today:

Looking at the correlations of various ions

Plots of our calcium-treatment data before removing redundant variables (you can tell there are a lot because many of the plots are straight-looking)

The lithium data had less obvious correlation

Our final calcium plot: the concentration of calcium is shown on the bottom, and the amounts of calcium and arsenic (red) sorbed onto the clay are shown on the y-axis. We had to throw out our last sample, so we don't know what it would look like at equilibrium.

Our final barium plot looks good!

Our final lithium plot shows that lithium probably doesn't help arsenic sorb onto the clay much.