We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.
“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality” Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p 79
{.wp-image-1390 .size-thumbnail .alignleft loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“1390” permalink=“https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2014/02/13/ecodata-retriever-quickly-download-and-cleanup-ecological-data-so-you-can-get-back-to-doing-science/data_retriever_logo_image_only/” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/jabberwocky.weecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/data_retriever_logo_image_only.png?fit=250%2C250&ssl=1” orig-size=“250,250”
Previously, I wrote a post with tips for new PIs on lab organisation. Since that time, I’ve started using Trello to organise operations in my lab. Trello is basically a way to track the progress of projects. Collaborative working is built-in. A friend had begun using Trello as she got involved in building an app. It seems that Trello is popular among teams working to develop software.
A while back I made this little Automator script to convert Microsoft Word doc and docx files to PDF. It’s useful for when you are sent a bunch of Word files for committee work. Opening PDFs in Preview is nice and hassle-free. Struggling with Word is not. It’s not my own work, I just put it together after googling around a bit. I’ll put it here for anyone to use. To get it working: Open Automator.
We are very excited to announce the newest release of our EcoData Retriever software and the first release of a supporting R package, ecoretriever. If you’re not familiar with the EcoData Retriever you can read more here.
I thought I would start add a blog to our lab website. The plan is to update maybe once a week with content that is too long for twitter but doesn’t fit in the categories on the lab website. I’m thinking extra analysis, paper commentaries, outreach activities etc. Let’s see how it goes. First up: how do you count the number of words or characters in a text file? Microsoft Word has a nice feature for doing this, but poor old TextEdit does not.
If you’ve every worked with scientific data, your own or someone elses, you know that you can end up spending a lot of time just cleaning up the data and getting it in a state that makes it ready for analysis. This involves everything from cleaning up non-standard nulls values to completely restructuring the data so that tools like R, Python, and database management systems (e.g., MS Access, PostgreSQL) know how to work with them.
Doing science in academia involves a lot of rejection and negative feedback. Between grant agencies single digit funding rates, pressure to publish in a few “top” journals all of which have rejection rates of 90% or higher [1], and the growing gulf between the number of academic jobs and the number of graduate students and postdocs [2], spending even a small amount of time in academia pretty much guarantees that you’ll see a lot of rejection.
During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.