- How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
- Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
- How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
- It may well involve patient capital though.
- This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
- How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
- Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
- And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
- The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
- CIMMYT in China.
- The banana as a weapon.
- Touring UK plant science sites.
- Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
- “Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
- “We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
- If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
- Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.
Nibbles: Agroforestry award, Medieval agrobiodiversity, Agricultural R&D, Fermentation, Climate-smart agriculture, Drought, Aleurites moluccana, Language erosion, Sri Lanka, Livestock, Peas
- My friend Zac bags a well-deserved award.
- Agricultural diversity in the Middle Ages: squirrels and cotton. And there’s probably more where those came from…
- Keeping score on agricultural research spending.
- Fermentables interview.
- What does this climate-smart agriculture look like anyway?
- And do they ever need it in the American midwest.
- And what in blazes is candlenut?
- A tool for documenting endangered languages. Maybe endangered landraces or crops one day too…
- Documented: One Sri Lankan farmer’s thoughts on sustainable agriculture.
- Not to mention the plusses and minuses of livestock — straight from the horse’s mouth.
- And the myth that will not die: King Tut’s peas alive and thriving. Kudos to Jackson Holtz, a properly skeptical reporter.
Nibbles: Fork, Prairies, Cynodon, Clove, Impact, Amazon, Blog, Horse, Thyme, Mauritius, Dyes
- Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork.
- Gotta love the Prairies.
- Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious.
- Gotta love the Spice Islands.
- How scientists can extract impact from their
navel-gazingresearch. - Gotta love online mapping platforms.
- Another journal starts a blog.
- Horses in agriculture, and history.
- Gotta love za’tar. It’s about thyme.
- Sweeter than sugar. Mauritius goes for fair trade and diversification.
- Dying for batik.
Nibbles: Plant Cuttings, Millennium Seed Bank, ITPGRFA, siRNA, Zoonoses information, Botanical garden, Rio +20, Italian bees, Brazilian coriander, Sri Lankan rice, International Treaty
- “Times are hard; everybody wants more (but seems to be getting less…)…”
- “The panels will produce enough energy to power all of the bank’s seed stores.”
- “One of the Benefit-sharing Fund’s unique features is the transparent process that governs the allocation of funds. After a wide announcement of each call, all the project proposals received for funding are evaluated according to established scientific criteria by international experts in order to fund the best projects.”
- “Basically we’re going to add bullets (siRNA) to the plants’ defense arsenal. It’s science fiction right now, but if it works, then the lengthy, expensive cleanup process could be shortened to two minutes.”
- “A new website provides examples of policies, institutions and stakeholders involved in the management of zoonoses, collated in a meta-database, together with discussion of cross-cutting themes and case studies to illustrate potential approaches.”
- “…the polka-dotted pumpkins were a hit.”
- “We all know this wasn’t the meeting where world governments were going to rise from the ashes.”
- “The tradition of micro-beekeeping has completely disappeared.”
- “No one buys beans, but they do buy cilantro.”
- “Teaming up with Alex Thanthriarachchi, 62, a reformed militant Marxist, Wijertane is on a mission to promote indigenous varieties of rice and other staples as the best way for Sri Lankan farmers to deal with changing climate.”
- “As a metaphor for itself, the treaty is the seed that is there and has been planted. It now needs to be used by all countries in order to keep sustaining life.”
MAPPR responds
A couple of days ago we donned the guise of an investor seeking a site for their cassava processing plant in Tanzania, and ended up expressing some reservations about the advertised ability of HarvestChoice’s MAPPR online mapping tool to help us out with that tricky task. We thus issued a challenge: “You be that policymaker in the blurb that wants to ‘identify regions of a country with high concentrations of both poverty and cropland.’ If you can do that, I promise to host the results here. And apologize to the MAPPR team.” Well, Stanley Wood has risen to the challenge in a comment on that post, which we now reproduce below. He also explains how the team intends to go about improving MAPPR, based in part on user feedback such as this. As for the apology, I’m happy to issue it. But I have one question for Stanley and the team. Do they really think the average policymaker is going to want to fiddle about sorting columns in an Excel spreadsheet to “identify regions of a country with high concentrations of both poverty and cropland”? Especially as they kind of have been promised a nice map in which the answer would just jump out at them… Anyway, we look forward to test-driving future versions of a tool with obviously a lot of potential, but which just isn’t quite there yet, and could obviously do with a bit more attention to the kind of specific use cases Stanley presents here, and we dealt with earlier. Many thanks to Stanley for taking the time to reply, and very best wishes to him and the MAPPR team.
Thanks for a very helpful posting in terms of sharpening our focus on potential MAPPR improvements. That rather long pipeline already includes alleviating some of the frustrations you encountered, particularly the inability to download user-created maps in addition to the table and chart download options. As shown on your screenshots of the Market Shed summary tool it is already possible to download the map in GIS format (the button with the – admittedly arcane – inscription “Download .SHP”), but that feature is indeed absent in the other summary options. What you (and others) have highlighted is also the lack of an option to download the map you created map in a cleanly annotated .png or similar format to put directly into a report or presentation. I think we maybe a month away from adding that capability.
We will follow up with our way more technical folks on the likely causes of the dreaded “404″ and see what that issue might be. I also don’t know what HI is, but I’m sure Chris can enlighten us. We will soon be adding server memory to enhance performance which might be a fix if it proves to be a capacity issue.
On the final comment about poverty and cropland, I went into MAPPR myself and made a map and table in less than a minute highlighting their coincidence at a district level in Tanzania. I saved the map and downloaded the table (and just as you did I had to grab the map with Print Screen for the time being).
Are some aspects of MAPPR both limiting and a bit kludgy? Indeed so. But feedback like yours and that of other users, in addition to our own pipeline of fixes and enhancements, can only serve to make it better. Indeed, since you’re an investor, we welcome your investment in our data and tools to speed up those improvements!
Meanwhile, please keep the feedback coming.
Stanley Wood