Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Faculty of Agricultural Sciences

Today I received the formal letter from Århus University concerning the fusion of our research institute with the university per January the first. They wrote, that I will receive another letter in the near future from the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries concerning the formal details about my reassignment. There are still almost 2 weeks until I receive my salary ;-) from the University.

In Danish the name of the new faculty is Det Jordbrugsvidenskabelige Fakultet, which means that we are able to maintain the three letter acronym DJF. I don't know the new acronym in English, it seems that the old one DIAS will have to be changed.

Based on new name there seems to be some interesting possibilities:-)

I still the recall when we moved from Copenhagen to Foulum. An officiel postcard was designed, which was meant to make it easy to send information to our international collaborators. The postcard showed a map of Denmark with a marker for Copenhagen and Foulum, and the title:

We have mowed

Since then I always imagine an army of researchers walking across Denmark, each with his own lawn mower...

Monday, December 18, 2006

Another nasty question

I think the single most frequent question during statistical consultancy here at Foulum is:

How do I calculate the standard eror on the original scale when I have made an analysis on transformed values.

Back in 1998 I wrote a short note adressing this problem together with Asger Roer Pedersen (now an employee at the National Envirenmental Institute).

Unfortunately, people have trouble finding it, so just to refresh

Jørgensen, E. & Pedersen A.R. (1998 ). How to obtain those nasty standard errors from transformed data - and why they should not  be used. Biometry Research Unit - Internal report 7. Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences. pp 20

Or, via my publication page: Erik Jørgensen's Publications

Monday, December 11, 2006

A new blog is taking form

I have gathered a lot of examples about the use of Bayesian Networks and Markov Processes during the last 15 years. That is why I have startet a new blog : Bayesian Networks and Markov Processes in Agriculture. The examples have been used for different lectures, presentations and workshops. At the moment, the examples are more or less scattered on different obsolete servers and some of them on my own hard disk.

My plan is to transfer the examples to the blog, when I have some spare time. In addition examples of current research will be included

Until now I have only made a few postings, mainly based on examples in Bedre Beslutninger med Bayesianske Netværk and Potential Application Areas for Bayesian Networks within Animal Production.

In addition to Bayesian Networks, the examples will include Markov Processes, as they are used in models of e.g. animal behaviour and epidemiological models and decision support in farm management.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Blog converted to Beta Blogger

During the weekend, I converted my blogs to Google's new beta Blogger. The most important result is a far more convenient handling of labelling/tagging individual posts. The conversion lead to some changes in layout. Google beta is based on a more user-friendly interface for designing the web-pages. I have tried to maintain the existing design, but I have added some new links in the sidebar

Among other new features is the possibility to create blogs with limited access, that is, only invited users can see the blogs, and the atom/RSS feeds for posts with a specific label.