Posts tagged research

• Broken pipelines

  A research organisation in LinkedIn claimed excellent achievements collaborating with industry: researchers have solved ‘the problem’. I just happened to…
  12 Jun, '25

• This manuscript could have been a blog post

  I often think that when reading or writing manuscripts for journal articles. The article ‘formula’ contains many, sorry, formulaic components.…
  18 May, '25

• Breeding: the two sides of accuracy

  I have been reading several documents in which methodologies are compared in terms of accuracy: the correlation between true and…
  8 Apr, '25

• One of my manuscripts was rejected by a journal

  ‘That’s par for the course!’ you could say, except that I don’t play or understand golf, so I take it…
  26 Mar, '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

• Sometimes one has to wait a long time

  While tidying up my office I found the handout that accompanied my presentation in a breeding strategy meeting, held in…
  7 Dec, '24

• What is in your "incomplete project" drawer?

  I love learning, trying new ways (to me) of analysing data. Most of my learning is self-taught (autodidact would be…
  28 Nov, '24

• 9,000 km to the East

  The end (of the semester) is nigh, involving the typical drama of assignments, grades, etc. On top of that, Duncan…
  10 Oct, '24

• Last day of teaching

  …for this semester. I was really trying to keep my head above water, but gulp, glug, I kept on taking…
  31 May, '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

• Water stress, Dothistroma and remote sensing

  ༄> Long-term effects of water stress on hyperspectral remote sensing indicators in young radiata pine.
  15 Mar, '24

• Experiments in glasshouse

  ༄> Blocking and re-arrangement of pots in greenhouse experiments: which approach is more effective?
  15 Mar, '24

• Plant image analysis

  ༄> The pliman (plant image analysis) package is designed to analyze plant images, particularly for leaf and seed analysis. It offers…
  14 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

• Basic course on population genetics

  ༄> Population genetics course by Bruce Weir and Jerome Goudet. I added it to the Internet Archive as well.
  3 Mar, '24

• Improving genomic selection

  ༄> Would data augmentation improve the performance of within-family selection in forestry datasets?
  3 Mar, '24

• Processing LiDAR

  ༄> Looking for alternatives to the lidR R package, for research purposes, plus some resources to start working on it.
  2 Mar, '24

• Background on research and memex

  ༄> “As we may think” by Vannevar Bush (1945), the introduction of the Memex (local copy PDF)
  1 Mar, '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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Dropping predatory journals

  Web of Science de-listed (stopped indexing) 82 journals because of essentially predatory practices, including some long-suspected publishers (like Hindawi with…
  16 Apr, '23

• Reviewing a manuscript in two hours

  Today I declined to review a manuscript for a journal because the English language in the title and abstract, which…
  1 Mar, '23

• Entrevista: información de fondo

  El jueves pasado, miércoles en Chile, grabamos una entrevista con Gabriel León. Espero haber dejado claro que era mi opinión…
  26 Feb, '23

• Implementing a model as an R package

  In our research group we often have people creating statistical models that end up in publications but, most of the…
  24 Apr, '19

• Being data curious: the strange case of lamb consumption in NZ

  There is a lot of talk about the skills needed for working in Statistics/Data Science, with the discussion often focusing…
  6 Feb, '18

• Keeping track of research

  If you search for data analysis workflows for research there are lots of blog posts on using R + databases…
  21 Oct, '17

• Financiamiento de investigación

  He pospuesto muchas veces este post, así es que va en su estado actual, incompleto, parcialmente digerido, como para empezar…
  1 Nov, '15

• Comment on Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest

  After writing a blog post about the paper “Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest” I…
  29 Jul, '14

• Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open source software?

  “Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open software?” I overheard a couple of young researchers…
  15 Dec, '13

• If one were to invent scientific journals today

  While taking a shower I was daydreaming about what would happen if one were to invent journals today, with a…
  15 Dec, '13

• When R, or any other language, is not enough

  This post is tangential to R, although R has a fair share of the issues I mention here, which include…
  15 Dec, '12

• Publication incentives

  (This post continues discussing issues I described back in January in Academic publication boycott)
  19 Oct, '12

• My approach to presentations

  I give a fair number of presentations per year, some to university students (in classes from 6 to 90 students),…
  21 May, '12

• On the destruction of a trial of genetically modified pines

  The media in New Zealand briefly covered the destruction of a trial with genetically modified pines (Pinus radiata D. Don,…
  16 Apr, '12

• Academic publication boycott

  The last few weeks there has been a number of researchers calling for, or supporting, a boycott against Elsevier; for…
  30 Jan, '12

• Idea fishing, idea growing

  This month I started working for the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, where I am supposed to teach, supervise…
  31 Jan, '06