The contents of this post fall squarely within the category of things I’d forget if I didn’t write them down. Recently I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I was computing 144 months worth of exposure to pollution from coal-fired power plants for every single 10 square-km pixel over land in India.
This can be done rather painlessly in R using the sf (simple features) and terra packages. Still, with the amounts of data being processed, storage and RAM can run low....
Let me set the scene. You find yourself studying graduate economics and are tasked to compile as much household expenditure data from low- and middle-income countries - or LMICs - as you can possibly muster.1 You think you are smart and immediately navigate to the World Bank’s Microdata Library to search, find, and download household expenditure data on countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe.2 Not long into your quest, however, you start to get side-tracked....
Remember the times when, as a kid, you were only allowed to go out to play if you had cleared up the chaos in your room first? While we might not have appreciated our parents’ persistence on the matter all too much back then (I sure did not), I think most people would agree - once they’re adults, that is - that it helped them with building good habits....