Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza
Mi post Tuesday evening mid-life crisis tuvo buena acogida. Como acá en Nueva Zelanda ya es viernes en la tarde, decidí empezar el fin de semana escuchando “Tabla de Salvación”, en que Leo Maslíah explica en vivo por qué Harrison Ford es un modelo para nuestras vidas. Genial.
There was a time, roughly 30 years ago, when my whole career extended to an unknown, distant future. What should I do? Where should I be working? were the questions in my mind during a hot Chilean summer. At that time, New Zealand and Australia were not in the horizon and I had just applied to my first forestry job in Valdivia.
I got that job and three years later I started my PhD. I met people, travelled, gained citizenships, made friends, learned many things, forgot others. Today, thirty years after that summer, I look to the next 10 years in the future and ask myself: What should I do? Where should I be working? The same questions plus What would be the best use of my time?
Now that distant unknown is three decades closer. Should I do more administration and, strange misnomer, “service” to the profession? (as if all the other work was not of service). Should I go for a new push of research work, write up all the ideas thought but not completed and published? Maybe I should transfer all I know to other people.
All of the above, a mix of two, one only… What would be the best use of my time?
I have been using internet since 1993, which means thousands of browsed sites, broken links, storing and losing information for over three decades. One obvious point of the exercise is that every time I have relied on someone else’s system I have ended up losing lots of information.
Delicio.us, Twitter, etc. have consumed my data and time without an ability to maintain a good archive of my information. The only data that has remained is the one I have personally stored under my own system/payment. I have been a slow learner in this respect, so I have started another section of this site, Aleph, just to store bits and pieces of information I am collecting while browsing.
The first post in Aleph briefly documents the rationale; actually it just links to Cory Doctorow’s post to that effect.
“Tree breeding has added 2 Billion dollars to the forest industry” said the presenter during a seminar.
Two billion? With a B? How come we struggle to get funding for projects then—I asked myself.
There are two testing cultures in forestry: the inventory/modeller crowd and the breeding crowd. The inventory crowd often relies on multiple-tree plots over a given area. Plots can be rectangular, circular, defined by prism, etc. The breeding crowd tends to use single-tree plots, because they (including myself) are testing many genotypes and it is more statistically efficient to use plots defined by a single individual.
Breeders use a selection index that gives a dollar value for each individual, while competing against a mix of genotypes (remember single-tree plots?). We would like to extend those results to inventory level and multiply the values by hundreds of thousands of hectares, there is a correlation with area-based performance, but not perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, I work in breeding. However, the selection values are Monopoly money until we get realised genetic gain validated by inventory plots in Real money. The two testing cultures have to match and forest valuation go up by $2 Billion before making a claim like that.
One day you are all happy and relaxed, with plenty of time for cooking dinner of any kind. Three course dinner? No problem! Then, one day, just around the corner comes the start of semester. It is a bit like when one is distracted at the beach, waving hello to a friend or loved one and a sneaky wave tackles us and runs us over without any consideration.
On the plus side, I am usually looking for links that could be interesting to first year forestry students. Some times they are about forestry related news, but others are nice implementations of data visualizations that tell an interesting story. That’s when I came across this interesting clustering of New York City neighbourhoods grouped by similarity of proportions of street-tree species, done by Kieran Healy.
Of course one thing leads to the next until I got to this great New York City Tree Map in which one can get information for nearly 3/4 of a million individual trees. Enough to motivate some students. Zoom in until finding a tree you like.
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