Jetsam 12: Warming up
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Jetsam 11: Two hundred beetles
I am a fan of Tim Prebble’s The Music of Sound, where he deals with field recording and the role of sound in general. Tim is running a field recording competition which requires ‘a cardboard box, a microphone, a recorder and you. Thats it! No processing allowed, submit a single take’.
I decided to go for something a bit creepy given the time of the year: getting close to Día de los Muertos. My setup was fairly simple:
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Jetsam 10: Chronos
Flotsam 13: early July links
Man flu kept me at home today, so I decided to do something ‘useful’ and go for a linkathon:
- Ed Yong discusses the effect of subject expectations in psychology experiments Nice Results, But What Did You Expect? At the beginning there was another article on The placebo phenomenon, and another one on The placebo defect.
- A googleVis tutorial to create Hans Rosling-type graphs from R.
- Google’s Python Class is material for an intensive 2-day course on Python.
- An opinion piece on Calculus and statistics by Daniel Kaplan, on teaching a different version of your typical introductory calculus course, so it is useful for statistics. He goes as far as teaching calculus using R. There is more information in Project MOSAIC.
- Nice graphs on what happened to Asiana Airlines flight 214. I didn’t know there was so much available data for a specific flight.
- Biased and Inefficient, Thomas Lumley’s personal statistics blog (he insists that posting 75% of Statschat is not enough to qualify as personal). You may know Thomas from the survey package (or a few others).
- If you are a postgrad student in New Zealand you can apply for a NeSI (New Zealand eScience Infrastructure) postgraduate allocation to access high performance computing facilities.
- My previous post the USA versus Western Europe comparison of GM corn was the first time that I received more traffic from Facebook than from R-bloggers. Five hundred readers in total.
Over and out.
A few days ago I came across Jack Heinemann and collaborators’ article (Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest, Open Access) comparing the agricultural sectors of USA and Western Europe‡. While the article is titled around the word sustainability, the main comparison stems from the use of Genetically Modified crops in USA versus the absence of them in Western Europe.
I was curious about part of the results and discussion which, in a nutshell, suggest that “GM cropping systems have not contributed to yield gains, are not necessary for yield gains, and appear to be eroding yields compared to the equally modern agroecosystem of Western Europe”. The authors relied on several crops for the comparison (Maize/corn, rapeseed/canolasee P.S.6, soybean and cotton); however, I am going to focus on a single one (corn) for two reasons: 1. I can’t afford a lot of time for blog posts when I should be preparing lectures and 2. I like eating corn. Continue reading