Rumblings about (Plant) Sciences
What five decades doing research have told me (Pedro J. Aphalo)
[Business Insider] The discovery of the CRISPR genome-editing technology shows why basic research is so important.
I am posting this as an example that when doing research one has to broadly think how what one is working on may have useful implications for different problems than those we are aiming to study.
The other point, is that basic research, even if it does not have a known or expected application can have a huge contribution to solving practical problems.
In the interview Jorge has several insights about his career path and also advice for early stage researchers. I have been Jorge’s friend and collaborator for more than 30 years, and been a witness of how he has followed since he was an undergraduate the path he now gives as advice in the interview. The result has been a successful career doing very original research. (The article is not open-access, so the link will give you free access to the article only through the university network.)
It is nice that R is so popular nowadays. I have been using it since 1999 or so, when Jaakko Heinonen introduced me to it, and been convinced since 2002 when I started teaching it to undergrads, that once one grasps the logic behind it, it is not difficult to use. At that time, I even developed a couple of simple packages for use in my courses. More recently, in the last three years I have been doing a lot of programming in R, as I am developing a suite of packages, while earlier I had been mostly writing simple scripts for analysing data.
R is as a programming language quite unusual and takes some time to learn to squeeze all the possibilities out of it, both in terms of performance and programming paradigms, but I have grown to like it a lot.
A very simple and a bit superficial note on R was published a couple of weeks ago in Nature. The citations record used, surely underestimates the use of R, especially early on, as it was frequent to not cite R as a publication, and least to have the “R project” as the ‘author’ but instead to mention it as a “product” in materials and methods, or to cite the paper “Ihaka R, Gentleman R. 1996. R: a language for data analysis and graphics. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 5: 299–314.” In those times, even some editors refused to accept R itself as an entry in the list of references, something that did happen to me when I submitted a manuscript. The first article I published which cites R, or rather the 1996 paper on R, is from 2001, so although the first references to the “R project” may be from 2003 as mentioned in the Nature article, citations to books and articles describing R and R packages, appeared in the literature already in the late 1990’s.
http://www.nature.com/news/programming-tools-adventures-with-r-1.16609
Post in Finnish, worthwhile reading, especially if you feel guilty about spending time in coffee breaks, or think that those doing so, do not work hard enough.
Today there was an interesting article in Helsingin Sannomat.
http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/a1415168967244
The book by Mary Somerville, that is mentioned in the article is in the public domain and available, as many other old and interesting books, through the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/onconnexionphys00somegoog
I was particularly impressed by the preface written in the 1830’s:
In one of the comments in HS a reader writes that programming is boring… I disagree, just coding may be boring, but designing software and algorithms is anything but boring!
Another reader correctly says that Ada is not a super-computer language. In a way it was meant to be when it was designed, but in the sense of being a tool for creating reliable and bug-free software. However, as some other languages designed by a committee it ended being too complex and inconsistent, and because of this, difficult to use as a general purpose language.
I guess most people reading this blog already know about the role of CFCs in the thinning of the ozone layer and its extreme manifestation the “ozone hole”. (If not you will find explanations here and here and ozone depletion maps here, and information on the Montreal protocol here and here.)
An article by Prof. Nigel Paul published in the The Conversation highlights the success of the protocol.
However, what fewer people know is that CFCs are potent “greenhouse gases”, and a recent article discusses why of all measures taken up to day, what has most significantly contributed to slowing-down global warming is the Montreal protocol. In my view, to a large extent this just shows how little progress has been achieved in reducing emissions of other “greenhouse gases” like carbon dioxide. A recent article in The Economist highlights this.
University of Helsinki