I come crawling back with a sense of guilt that I haven't kept up with this, only begging this blog to take me back once again. I promise, I'll never falter again, never sway, steadfast in my resolve.
Though I've been working tirelessly(merely a phrase, not the truth), I've come against roadblocks that are slowing my progress towards getting my degree. Not for long, though, as I still intend to graduate this coming summer. I've been busy doing analyses on the demographic data from the forests in Cambria, looking at such things as lambda (population growth rates), stable stage structure(if the population continued on it's trajectory, what would the distribution of certain sized individuals be), reproductive contribution(I'm sure you've got that one), but now it's time to get outside this comfort zone, the known, and delve into the theoretical deep, probing the population with hypothetical survivorship changes to determine what it takes to really throw this populations growth up or down. Anyhow, working on my statistics for the ectomycorrhizal shifts in community and its dependence on environmental factors. Getting rather comfortable in R, which is an open-source statistical/programming package with loads of bells and whistles. It's a rather steep learning curve, but it's coming along and fortunately, the community behind its development and use are fervent supporters of the R newcomer.
Great sites that I've come across include: Stackoverflow (a generally helpful programming website with increasing traffic and pages from the R community)
Quick-R - (Super helpful R site)
Cerebral Mastication - Links to other R sites along with helpful info
For developing your programming chops and picking up some basic mathematical background, I've found Project Euler to be incredible. Solve number problems by figuring out the basic mathematical concepts that these questions are based around and then programming your package(R in my case, most others use Python, Ruby, C++, etc.) to determine the correct answer. It's suduko for the new age. It's all the rage and I'm surprised you hadn't heard!
