Mathematical shapes can affect our lives and the decisions we make. The hockey stick graph describing the earths average temperature over the last millennia has been the subject of a controversial debate over reliability of methods of statistical analysis. From this to this ... The long tail is another new icon, described in a new book, developed in the Blogosphere, by Chris Anderson called "The Long Tail": Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future Read more [...] 11 com

The recently published paper by Jane Elith and Catherine Graham et.al."Novel methods improve prediction of species' distributions from occurrence data" (EG06) is sure to be a landmark study in the field. EG06 compares 16 modeling methods using 226 well-surveyed species in 6 regions of the world. Measures of statistical skill on held back data show a spread from a wide range of methods including: the older methods such as BIOCLIM, DOMAIN, through GARP, GLM and GAM to the newer arrivals from machine Read more [...] 8 com

Having run across two recent notes on science blogs by academics, and written a post about the benefits of blogs to scientists here, I felt compelled to issue a warning for readers, that while there are positives and negatives to blogs -- they just don't get it. One called Environmental Science Adrift in the Blogosphere (summary free) worries that statements concerning the range of estimates of the number of species going extinct diverge from the 'scientific consensus' and urges scientists to get Read more [...] 3 com

The new [tag]WhyWhere[/tag] application is starting to work smoothly on [tag]large datasets[/tag] now (http://landscape.sdsc.edu/ww-testform.html). I have added a list of all terrestrial data (All_Terrestrial), though there will be some errors until I clean that lot up, it should be usable. I have been thinking about how to deal with the numbers of data sets in a [tag]streaming data[/tag] framework. The issue with specifying environmental datasets to use in an analysis comes down to accommodating Read more [...] 4 com