Category: Information

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Visualizing data

Stop press: Google bought Gapminder yesterday. Thanks Patchwork Planet. Still no sign of any good Ag data though.

Google has started hosting Gapminder, a wonderful tool for visualizing development data developed by a Swedish NGO. Here’s an example of what you can do with it. Worth playing around with. But to see a master at work, check this out. There are only a few variables at the moment, but wouldn’t it be great if one day the data in FAOSTAT were to be added? Anyone want to volunteer to do the mash-up?

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Drum Beat on IK

The Drum Beat is “a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development.” This week’s edition focuses on indigenous knowledge and has lots of good stuff, including for example information on an online database of Tibetan folk medicines.

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Vegetable soup as chemical reagent

Here’s one that’s hard to characterize: scientists in the US and Brazil say that common vegetables contain many of the chemicals that chemists need to perform their research, and that scientists in the developing countries, who often lack the funds to buy reagents, should make use of these resources. I’m not competent to judge but the paper, in the Journal of Natural Products, contains a pretty impressive list of things you can make (chemically) from vegetables.

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Non-wood forest products information

You may remember I blogged recently about a couple of FAO news resources, on plant breeding and on biotechnology. I just want to mention today a third: FAO’s Non-Wood Forest Products Digest, the focus of which is pretty self-explanatory. You can subscribe to it here((FAO’s link is broken.)) (there does not seem to be an RSS feed), thereby joining 1300 other people around the world. The website also has past issues. It comes around by email a couple of times a month, and it has the introductory text of articles, announcements etc., with links to the full pieces.

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CABI blogs seed storage

“Hand picked…and carefully sorted” is where CABI’s content specialists go to blog. I came across it only when they linked to our water hyacinth story of a couple of weeks back, but it looks like it’s been going since November last year at least. Exploring the plant sciences stuff, I came across two pieces on seed conservation which make an interesting juxtaposition: this entry on indigenous methods of seed conservation in Bangladesh, which includes a CABI video, and this on the Svalbard International Seed Vault. Entries often have links to CABI publications and there is an RSS feed. Really great stuff.