Category: writing (Page 1 of 5)

What is in your “incomplete project” drawer?

2024-11-28 / Luis

I love learning, trying new ways (to me) of analysing data. Most of my learning is self-taught (autodidact would be the two-dollar word); that is, I hit my head against a problem for a few times, read blogs, articles, more head-hitting and get things working. In some ways the process is highly inefficient: it would be a lot easier to take a course (if available). However, the inefficiency is somewhat compensated by the actual learning that occurs, as learning by doing is easier to retain.

Many researchers run a lot of ideas, some of them end up as published articles, but many (most in my case) are never formally published. Formal publication needs a lot of work and—confession time—I often find the formal writing part really-super-extremely boring. Writing fiction is fun, following a recipe for an article not so much for me. I really envy people for whom scientific writing comes easily.

Anyhow, I was reading this article announcement in LinkedIn and then I thought “I was mucking around with something related in 2019!”. Using Bayes B approaches with extractive contents in wood, but in my case it didn’t work out so well, so I shoved it in my incomplete project drawer. I don’t mean a literal, physical drawer in my desk, but in a computer folder. This got me thinking about all the other things that were learning experiments, just sitting there. And this took me to thinking of other researchers and their own drawers: there must be a huge number of ideas, experiments, analyses that never went anywhere, not even as a blog post.

On the plus side, I get the pleasure of reading and learning about NIRS from a cool paper on blueberry breeding (yum!).

Imagine a disorganised drawer, but instead of cables it contains incomplete analyses.

Fragmentation of patience

2024-11-24 / Luis

I have been online since 1993, with my first website in 1996, blog and wiki in 2002, Twitter in 2006, etc. Twitter started getting really bad around 2015, to the point that in 2018 I created an account in mastodon.social which, after a couple of moves, ended up in my current account in mastodon.nz.

Part of my Twitter network stayed there, part moved to Mastodon—where I also connected with new people, part moved to LinkedIn—where I started from scratch a year ago—and the biggest part moved to BlueSky during last year.

One can learn several things from this fragmentation:

Having a single failure point, THE social media site, is a risky proposition.
Descentralised sites are more resilient to takeover, but much harder to explain to the average user, which tends to explain their slow growth.
There is no reasoning with bots and bored ghouls: block early and often; the alternative is to be overrun by them.

And that’s why I sometimes remove comments and, if the commenter is too eager and desperate, I block them. Run out of patience ten years ago.

Plaza Nueva Zelandia in Santiago; not quite the global town square promised by Twitter in the 2000s.

Counter of La Picada de Pedro, showing lots of yummy food.

Breeding: simple interfaces, complex strategies

2024-06-14 / Luis

I found this text I wrote 20 years ago(*), part of a discussion document I prepared for a review of the radiata pine breeding strategy. Fixed a couple of typos, but I guess we still need pretty much the same thing. 🤔

“Different breeders value different things or, better put, they emphasise different values when developing breeding strategies. One of the reasons why many breeding programs struggle to achieve results is that they face an extremely complex list of activities, which are almost impossible to complete.

“A knee-jerk reaction from some breeders has been to recur to the KISS principle when developing breeding strategies. Unfortunately, the typical reaction has been “let’s create this dumb down strategy because it is simple to apply”. Bzzz. Wrong answer! What they have often done is to create a glorified “deployment strategy” that has almost no chance of surviving in the long term: that is, short term gain based on long term disappointment.

“Breeders need to realise that what needs to be simple is the _interface_ of the strategy. This means that we need a smooth interaction between the “theoretical animal” and the people that will be implementing it. This does not mean that the strategy is theoretically simple, but that the day-to-day activities are a breeze to complete.

“This type of interface requires the development—either in-house or through contracting the service—of tools that make life easy. For example:

Easy access to predicted breeding values, including desktop and online access. In addition, there needs to be an idea of the reliability of those predicted values if we are going to use them for deployment purposes.
Tools that make easy deciding what to select and which trees should be mated with each other (mate selection and allocation).
Protocols for deployment and tools for keeping control of the availability of genetic material.
Easy management of the interaction between improvement and deployment objectives.

“In summary, breeders need tools for dealing with the huge amount of data created by breeding and deployment activities, so it can be transformed into information.”

(*) Well, 19 years ago, this was 2005, but twenty sounds much better.

Home-made Tom yum with fishmeat balls on rice noodles.

Last day of teaching

2024-05-31 / Luis

…for this semester. I was really trying to keep my head above water, but gulp, glug, I kept on taking water in. There is a pile of marking and two exams coming my way in a few weeks. Anyone that could invite me to their home in Rarotonga? I need to recover from the always brutal semester steam roller.

Despite all the teaching, ideas keep on living for free in my head. Where to next? This is a common question when working in research: at some point the project has to be completed. Perhaps everything went well and the objectives were achieved, the findings were published, the student completed their PhD, etc. Or, perhaps, the whole thing was messy, or unattainable, or the experiment didn’t work out, or we run out of money.

Last weekend one of our students submitted his PhD, with chapters either published or somewhere in the publication pipeline. There is a sense of Where to next? From an implementation point of view, it is a matter of using the results, perhaps tweaking things here and there, but now it is an operational breeding programme issue. That topic will have to wait before I revisit it.

In conversations with a colleague in Chile (A) we talk ideas. Another colleague (B)informs us that our frontrunner was “too applied” for funding. It could make a significant practical difference, at least in my opinion, but the funding body has a strong preference for more “fundamental” research. The same funding body that does not like forestry too much, because it is “too slow”. When you put fundamental + forestry is hard to get results in 3 years of funding. Go figure.

B suggested another idea in which I am still getting my head around. Not quite my topic BUT I am a sucker for interesting problems and learning. Now reading about stuff that’s new for me, and see if I can connect it in a meaningful way to #breeding and #woodquality, and I don’t have to go all the way to Kevin Bacon’s degrees of separation.

I dislike (or should I say hate?) the push of Large Language Models (LLM) for writing. I can’t see the point, because Where is the terapeutic value of asking ‘write 300 words in Luis’ style’? I can, pardon, I need to write this because I can’t stop writing. I have to empty my head: it is 4:30 pm, Friday afternoon, the last day of teaching of this semester. Phew! And that’s how #academia feels today, ladies and gentlemen.

Muestras de pino radiata mostrando distorsión

Escogemos producir madera de baja calidad

2024-04-28 / Luis

Tercera patita(*). La semana pasada participé en tres reuniones en el éter (online dirían algunos), discutiendo investigación en diferentes aspectos del sector forestal, tanto en plantaciones como en bosque nativo. En una de ellas, alguien comentó acerca del bajo nivel de calidad de la madera: la proporción de madera de pino radiata que puede ser usado en la construcción es muy baja. ¿La razón? Es una especie de baja calidad.

Mi opinión es diferente: la crisis de los pequeños y medianos procesadores forestales es parcialmente autoinfligida por el sector forestal. No es que el pino radiata sea intrínsecamente malo para producir madera estructural y de apariencia; es mediocre, pero sirve. El problema es que dónde ha sido establecido, el tipo de material genético y el manejo silvicultural han sido optimizados para producir cantidad y no calidad. No solo por los pequeños y medianos, sino por los grandes también. La pulpa de madera domina el negocio y condiciona muchos otros aspectos de la industria basada en plantaciones de especies exóticas.

Por eso cuando escribía de qué y a quién subsidiamos, de que repetir actividades pasadas va a terminar repitiendo los resultados, tenía esto en mente. Por los últimos 50 años la industria a escogido producir madera de baja calidad y cualquier conversación de subsidios debe partir de esta base. No quiero estar el año 2074 teniendo esta misma discusión.

No faltará quién cuestione estas opiniones como negativas y pregunte ¿qué haces para cambiar las cosas? Bueno, las tres reuniones son para tres proyectos con esa intención.

(*) Término de cueca. Los dos post anteriores son ¿A quién subsidiamos en el sector forestal? y ¿A quién citamos en el sector forestal?