Posts tagged linkedin

• I come from the future

  It’s already 2025 in Aotearoa New Zealand. The universe did not collapse with the change of year. Moreover, the universe…
  1 Jan, '25

• New publication, one more rule

  This week we got an article published in New Forests on phenotyping radiata pine for resin. This is part of…
  9 Dec, '24

• Time for correlations

  A few posts ago I was talking about heritabilities (like here) and it’s time to say something about genetic correlations.…
  4 Sep, '24

• When heritability is high but the phenotype is dominated by the environment

  I was reading a LinkedIn post that said “heritability is the extent to which differences in observed phenotypes can be…
  23 Aug, '24

• You realise that New Zealand is small when…

  I was chatting with a colleague (Salvador Gezan) in April about teaching, learning and books, and he suggested “have a…
  13 Aug, '24

• The best part of LinkedIn

  After “professional Twitter’s” demise I joined LinkedIn (less than a year ago) to keep in touch with colleagues. Overall, I…
  1 Aug, '24

• Start with the programming language and statistical approach used by your community

  I have been very busy with the start of the semester, teaching regression modelling. The craziest thing was that the…
  22 Jul, '24

• The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID)

  This is a popular* dictum by systems theorist Stafford Beer, pointing out that the self-described purpose of a system (or…
  18 Jul, '24

• Having a peek at sheep breeding

  One of the cool things about Quantitative Genetics is that it works everywhere. As a forester, I work with trees…
  9 Jul, '24

• Questions while watching Netflix

  In 2022 28% of New Zealand’s total exports and 53% of the forestry exports (by value) went to China. China’s…
  7 Jul, '24

• There is value in better explanations

  I am often fascinated by people who can explain something that I already know but in a much better way.…
  30 Jun, '24

• Why are you complicating the analysis?

  Progeny trials (or progeny testing or genetic tests or whatever you call them) are a real money pit. They are…
  28 Jun, '24

• Have you visited the trials?

  I was having a chat with analysts that just had a project dumped on their lap. They were questioning previous…
  21 Jun, '24

• The AI House of Cards

  Many of the people pushing today for AI to be used in all organisations, particularly of the ChatGPT/LLM persuasion, were…
  20 Jun, '24

• Breeding: simple interfaces, complex strategies

  I found this text I wrote 20 years ago(*), part of a discussion document I prepared for a review of…
  14 Jun, '24

• Are PhDs a pyramid scheme?

  If you are a professor in academia you are supposed to form/train new PhDs. In the past, those new PhDs…
  6 Jun, '24

• Why is this trait I like getting worse in the breeding programme?

  The short answer: because the trait you like is not part of the breeding objective and, therefore, has not an…
  5 Jun, '24

• Back of the envelope calculations: pulp mill

  Imagine that someone stops you on the street and asks “How many hectares of plantations do we need for a…
  12 May, '24

• Exposing rather than hiding complexity

  In the mid-1990s I was at Massey University in Palmerston North, centre of the known universe, where I was doing…
  9 May, '24

• Escogemos producir madera de baja calidad

  Tercera patita(*). La semana pasada participé en tres reuniones en el éter (online dirían algunos), discutiendo investigación en diferentes aspectos…
  28 Apr, '24

• A dollop of Spanish

  Most of my followers are English speakers (native speakers, second-language, third-language, nth-language speakers) so they could be confused by my…
  22 Apr, '24

• ¿A quién citamos en el sector forestal?

  En mi post anterior preguntaba ¿A quién subsidiamos en el sector forestal?, lo que despertó una buena y civilizada discusión.…
  22 Apr, '24

• ¿A quién subsidiamos en el sector forestal?

  Las últimas semanas ha habido una ofensiva comunicacional grande del sector forestal chileno, con participación de las empresas grandes, CORMA,…
  17 Apr, '24

• Do you remember your first time?

  You were nervous. Would they like it as much as you did? Would you make the cut? Your first manuscript…
  16 Apr, '24

• Sometimes we want more, sometimes we want less

  I am running analyses for a new article with my colleague Clemens Altaner (a smart cookie), reprocessing old samples to…
  11 Apr, '24

• All that glitters (still) is not GxE interaction

  Five months ago I was saying all that glitters is not GxE interaction, putting forward the idea that, at least…
  10 Apr, '24

• Taylor & Francis made me do it

  Today I received an email from Taylor & Francis letting me know that the final volume and pagination for one…
  4 Apr, '24

• I do not work in that topic, except when I do

  —We are planning a conference on changes to silviculture because of forest fires and climate change… Do you wanna come?…
  3 Apr, '24

• Not a miracle worker

  —The genetic correlations are very high. Can you check them? —Sure
  31 Mar, '24

• A few things that I expect to find in a well-functioning breeding programme

  A good understanding of the biological traits that have an effect on profit. Can we identify new, more efficient selection criteria?
  13 Mar, '24

• Tuesday evening mid-life crisis

  There was a time, roughly 30 years ago, when my whole career extended to an unknown, distant future. What should…
  5 Mar, '24

• Monopoly money vs real money

  “Tree breeding has added 2 Billion dollars to the forest industry” said the presenter during a seminar.
  2 Mar, '24

• Teaching tsunami

  One day you are all happy and relaxed, with plenty of time for cooking dinner of any kind. Three course…
  29 Feb, '24

• New publication on peeler cores and slabwood for pulp use

  Second collaboration with my pals at Universidad de Concepción: Juan Pedro Elissetche and Rosa María Alzamora Mallea. This time also…
  14 Feb, '24

• Old dog, etc

  Yesterday I attended an introduction to “Artificial Intelligence in Forestry”* workshop at the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury. There…
  12 Feb, '24

• More than heritability 🎶

  It is easy to get obsessed with heritabilities when you start working in breeding and genetics. The idea that a…
  5 Feb, '24

• Lecture on enshitification

  Cory Doctorow’s My McLuhan lecture on enshittification. How we got to the current dystopia and how we can fix it.…
  30 Jan, '24

• Python not suitable platform for reproducible research

  While [Active Papers] has achieved its mission of demonstrating that unifying computational reproducibility and provenance tracking is doable and useful,…
  28 Jan, '24

• The collapse of Eucalyptus globulus or future-proofing nonsense

  I cringe every time I hear the term “future proofing”. It can be read as doing something to avoid facing…
  27 Jan, '24

• Fascinated by change

  The last 2 months or so I have been revisiting the Chilean forest sector and mentally comparing values with other…
  24 Jan, '24

• We all stopped expanding our forest estate

  A few days ago I was comparing afforestation figures—planting in area that didn’t have trees before—across New Zealand, Chile and…
  13 Jan, '24

• New plantations in AU, NZ and CL

  Looking at new forest plantations areas in Chile (data from INFOR), Australia (ABARES) and New Zealand (MPI) since 1994, as…
  3 Jan, '24

• Collaborative competition

  I was reading Peter Amer’s Pre-competitive collaboration in which he discusses the interaction between private and public sectors in research…
  23 Dec, '23

• What Would Akaike Do?

  This AIC looks way more fun than the other AIC for (soft toy) model selection.
  23 Dec, '23

• Leaking genetic gain: not quite a selection index

  A few years ago I was talking with a breeder who spent substantial time running genetic analyses, with fairly sophisticated…
  21 Dec, '23

• Long-term and longer-term

  Last Tuesday I had a very interesting visit (coordinated by Dr Verónica Emhart) and discussion with the breeding team at…
  15 Dec, '23

• Names and things

  There was a time when we used to take one or more field crews and we would measure trees. As…
  10 Dec, '23

• Why did my breeding values go down?

  At first, the question may sound strange. You have been collecting data, running analyses using various acronyms (PBLUP, GBLUP, HBLUP,…
  30 Nov, '23

• I am a sucker… for interesting problems

  As a child and as a young person I moved a lot (schools, cities, countries). On one side it gave…
  25 Nov, '23

• Big blob thesis OR chapter = publication?

  I have a PhD student that should be submitting by approximately Christmas time, so the last week has been a…
  22 Nov, '23

• Are we working with a model organism?

  There are organisms that are highly popular in research, like fruit flies or mice in animals,Arabidopsis or poplars in plants.…
  18 Nov, '23

• Essentially

  A month ago I said “trees are much more than wood and one of our PhD students at the School…
  15 Nov, '23

• At the core of your breeding programme

  Surely you have been in this situation: meeting, there is coffee and biscuits at the back, some fruit if you’re…
  11 Nov, '23

• In between plant and animal breeding 1: economic weights

  Unless you live in paradise and you have a single objective trait—so your whole breeding objective is “more X”—you have…
  7 Nov, '23

• Carbon

  I am fascinated by trees, those cute and enormous organisms made out of air. The idea that I can hug…
  4 Nov, '23

• Even worse than pedigree errors: selecting for the wrong thing

  Imagine this: you have been patiently assessing trees for wood density (selection criterion) thinking that you’re improving wood stiffness (objective…
  3 Nov, '23

• In between plant and animal breeding 1

  Let’s start with the obvious: trees are plants and—unless you are breeding Ents—they do not walk around. Therefore, the first…
  2 Nov, '23

• Do I have pedigree errors?

  We just finished a genetic analysis, got breeding values for all our selection criteria, combined them with genetic parameters and…
  31 Oct, '23

• How old is your favourite language?

  We often forget for how long we’ve been writing code in specific languages. For example, I started using SAS in…
  31 Oct, '23

• All that glitters is not GxE interaction

  We are going over the fifth version(*) of a manuscript with a Ph.D. student and colleagues, polishing some details before…
  27 Oct, '23

• Early selection: how early is early enough? Part 4

  In the previous post we were able to screen trees for wood properties at 2 years of age, separating normal…
  21 Oct, '23

• Early selection: how early is early enough? Part 3

  In my previous post we were able to detect extremes of wood density and stiffness with leaning trees at 8…
  17 Oct, '23

• Early selection: how early is early enough? Part 2

  In the previous post I mentioned that we wanted to screen trees for wood properties as early as possible, BUT…
  14 Oct, '23

• Early selection: how early is early enough? Part 1

  Different people write for different reasons. In my case, I write to remember how and why I did research with…
  12 Oct, '23

• Eucalypts essential oils

  These days I deal mostly with quantitative genetics and wood properties. However, trees are much more than wood and one…
  10 Oct, '23