Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

As this is my first crack at an explanatory post, I'd appreciate feedback on both the level and quality of the writing.  Thanks! One of the things I plan to do on this blog is delve a little deeper into ecological stories that arise in the news.  A great opportunity popped up today in a front-page story in the New York Times about coral reef bleaching.  It seems that record temperatures this year are causing one of the largest coral die-offs in history.

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I am not really a wildlife person. My own work and perspective is systemic; I study global biogeochemical cycles, mathematical systems theory, and other large, shapeless, abstract ideas. I am terrible at recognizing and remembering the names of plants and animals in the field. Also, while I enjoy an aesthetic and spiritual connection to nature, my own brand of environmentalism leans towards saving ourselves - nature for nature's sake has usually taken second place in my mind.

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Editor’s Note: This is a repost of Michael’s original post at his own site. Here is the dplyr talk that I recently gave to the Davis R Users’ Group. dplyr is an R library that does basic data manipulation extremely well. It is designed to make the data handling tasks that we all do over and over as easy as possible. It produces highly readable syntax that is low cognitive overhead to write.

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Work sessions: We have weekly, 2-hour co-work sessions where users come to work on their own projects and get help. Talks and tutorials: About every other week, the first half of our work sessions is dedicated to a presentation. These are mainly tutorials on tools in R. Sometimes they are “show-and-tell” where a user presents an analysis for feedback. Most speakers walk through a script on a large screen, and Q & A takes up half of the time.

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