Quantum Forest – Page 3 – notes in a shoebox

Keeping track of research

On 2017/10/21

If you search for data analysis workflows for research there are lots of blog posts on using R + databases + git, etc. While in some cases I may end up working with a combination like that, it’s much more likely that reality is closer to a bunch of emailed Excel or CSV files.

Some may argue that one should move the whole group of collaborators to work the right way. In practice, well, not everyone has the interest and/or the time to do so. In one of our collaborations we are dealing with a trial established in 2009 and I was tracking a field coding mistake (as in happening outdoors, doing field work, assigning codes to trees), so I had to backtrack where the errors were introduced. After checking emails from three collaborators, I think I put together the story and found the correct code values in a couple of files going back two years.

Influences: Cronopios and Famas

By Luis

On 2017/10/20

In books, recycling

Books have accompanied me for all my life, or at least for as long as I can remember. However, my reading habits have changed many times, from reading simple books, to reading very complex books, to reading anything, to reading if I squeeze a few minutes here and there, to… you get the idea. ‘Habits’ is a funny word, an oxymoron, to refer to constant change.

Today I was thinking of influential books. No ‘good’ books or books that have received many awards or that have guided generations or catalyzed social change. I mean only books that have been important for me at a given point in time. If I had read them before or after that time they may have passed unnoticed. But I read them then, at the right time… for me.

This time is Calvino

By Luis

On 2017/10/16

In books, recycling

This happens relatively frequently: I am talking with someone else that doesn’t know me well and, at some point of the conversation I have mentioned that I am a forester. Then we move into books and I mention someone like Borges or Calvino and they look at me with this puzzled face as in ‘I didn’t know that foresters could read’. I know, it happens to other professions as well; just for the record not all of us are semi-literate apes, working with a chainsaw.

I was sorting out my bookshelves at work when I found a copy of The literature machine, a collection of essays by Italo Calvino. It had my name and signature, together with 2002, Melbourne, Australia. (Digression: besides my name and signature I always put the city where I bought a book). I had vague memories of walking around in Melbourne’s CBD and finding an underground bookshop. At the time I was not looking for anything in particular, just browsing titles.

Calculating parliament seats allocation and quotients

By Luis

On 2017/10/03

In programming, r, rblogs

I was having a conversation about dropping the minimum threshold (currently 5% of the vote) for political parties to get representation in Parliament. The obvious question is how would seat allocation change, which of course involved a calculation. There is a calculator in the Electoral Commission website, but trying to understand how things work (and therefore coding) is my thing, and the Electoral Commission has a handy explanation of the Sainte-Laguë allocation formula used in New Zealand. So I had to write my own seat allocation function:

New Zealand Electoral Commission results website. It held really well in election night.

Collecting results of the New Zealand General Elections

By Luis

On 2017/10/02

In programming, r, rblogs, teaching

I was reading an article about the results of our latest elections where I was having a look at the spatial pattern for votes in my city.

I was wondering how would I go over obtaining the data for something like that and went to the Electoral Commission, which has this neat page with links to CSV files with results at the voting place level. The CSV files have results for each of the candidates in the first few rows (which I didn’t care about) and at the party level later in the file.