University of Helsinki
This one in Finnish: http://www.r-ohjelmointi.org/ Full of very interesting stuff on R. Recommended.
Some new R stuff
Because I have some plans for an R course in Moodle, and also because I need to do some plots, I looked around in the web to see if there was something new. I found quite a lot, at least new to me. One is the package ggplot2 that may be easier to use than lattice and produces graphs with a different look.
The author is Had Wickman.
An example:
# load package
library(ggplot2)
# generate some artificial data
x=1:100
y2=x^2/100+rnorm(100)*5
# create a plot
qplot(x,y2,geom=c("smooth","point"))
Here are some links:
ggplot2 the home page for the package with links to videos, slides, etc. The package itself is in CRAN.
The author‘s PhD thesis
Some slides.
He has also written a book on ggplot2.
He has written other interesting packages but I’ll write about them later.
Plant club today
Both Fang and Matt had seminars today in the Plant Club series. Not many questions, but the public in this series is mostly interested in the molecular side of things.
COST action FA0906
The SenPEP is a partner in this action code-named “UV4Growth”. The action started officially functioning at the kick-off meeting at the COST office in Brussels. The meeting took place on 7 and 8 April 2010, so the action will end on 6 April 2014. The meeting in Brussels was a management committee (MC) meeting. There are two MC members for Finland, Minna Turunen and myself. I am also coordinating Finnish participation in this action. I am coordinator for WG3 and member of TG UV technology. I am also managing most of the e-mail lists. There will be small scientific meetings of WGs and TGs and also funds for visiting other laboratories within the action (mainly for PhD students and postdocs). There will be a larger meeting for the whole action in February 2011. The chair of the action is Marcel Jansen and the vice-chair Åke Strid. They were elected at the kick-off meeting.
Prof. Nigel Paul’s visit to Viikki
Prof. Nigel Paul visited our group in Viikki last Thursday. He gave a very interesting talk about his views on UV-B research and the directions into which he thinks it should move. He contrasted the old viewpoint of seeing UV-B as mainly a source of damage to plants and the new viewpoint of considering UV-B mainly as an environmental signal regulating plant growth and performance. From that he moved on to describe how we can take advantage of the regulatory responses in the management of crops grown under plastic films. He showed some very interesting examples of results from his experiments.
During the discussion Tapani Koskela from the Finnish Meteorological Institute made some comments relating to the uncertainties inherent in forecasts of future UV-B levels. There was also discussion about possible roles of UV-B in the regulation of plant behaviour in their natural environment.
Over lunch and in the afternoon most of the SenPEP members had the opportunity to discuss their research with Nigel.
Titta defended her PhD thesis!
Titta had her doctoral defence yesterday, and she defended her thesis very successfully. Her opponent was Professor Nigel Paul from Lancaster University, who led the discussion very well, making the occasion not only a very good examination but also a very interesting event for the audience.
In the karonkka, in the evening, the tone was very friendly and relaxed.
This is a great culmination for years of hard work, but it is also the start of a new stage in Titta’s academic career.
Congratulations Titta!
Ariel Novoplansky will visit us in September
Prof. Ariel Novoplansky from Israel will visit us in September, and will give a Monday talk.
One more reason to read carefully his paper scheduled for our next journal club session.
A couple of papers
Admin update
I finally managed to add the Meta widget to the home page. Now you can login from there and also access the Dashboard for writing new posts. Should make commenting and posting a bit easier.
I enabled WP-SpamFree as we were getting comment spam, mostly in Russian. Let’s see how it works.
The colour of light reflected by plants
A new post in my blog, prompted by a link that Matt sent me on the hundredth anniversary of IR photography.