Luigi is the data massage king around these parts, no doubt about it. So he’ll surely be pleased to see this quick round-up from the Global Health Metrics and Evaluation conference, 2011. Why? Because it offers new opportunities that I can barely begin to make sense of, not least a tool called Tableau Public, “a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web”. I took a quick gander, searching for some of my favourite terms. Alas, there isn’t a whole lot up there, except for this nifty look at the productivity of dairy cows in Wisconsin and yet another look at diabetes, poverty and obesity, which is awesomely interactive, but I’m sure that’ll change once Luigi gets his mitts on it. Maybe we could even find out whether life expectancy is related to percent of income spent on food.
Mapping aid
Thanks to CIAT’s Meike for news that
InterAction has just launched an interactive US Food Security Aid Map that provides detailed project-level information on food security and agriculture work being done by their member NGOs. The site can be browsed by location, sector, organization or project.
Here’s the map of agriculture projects: 1
As coincidence would have it, one of the projects is the orange-fleshed sweet potato work we mentioned in a recent post.
Searching on “agrobiodiversity” yielded nothing, but there were a few hits with “diversification.” Well worth exploring in a bit more detail. If only to identify places where some pre-emptive germplasm collecting might be in order.
To Serve and Conserve
That’s the title of the European Plant Genetic Resources Conference 2011, organized by Eucarpia, and on right now in Wageningen. Are you there? Can you tell us about it? We would particularly like to know the answer to the question “Whither genebanks?” asked by our old mate Geoff Hawtin. Oh, and here’s a note for the organizers: our blogging and twittering services come quite cheap.
Behold, the coconut!
Myths and legends surrounding the origins of food are, not surprisingly, very common. Here’s a new one on me: according to one story, deftly told by Roland Bourdeix on one of his blogs, the island of Niue — the Rock of Polynesia — owes its name to two very special varieties of coconut. But don’t take my word for it; read Roland’s post.
Are there other places named specifically for foods? And is there some central repository of myths and legends that involve agriculture and food? I don’t know of one.
Six-horned Semien sheep
Couldn’t resist posting this photo of a truly weird sheep.