VIR’s Pavlovsk Research Station, a set on Flickr.
Still all to play for at Pavlovsk.
Plantwise Knowledge Bank: The Video
The Plantwise knowledge bank will be a comprehensive global resource bringing together the best worldwide knowledge on crops, pests, diseases and weeds.
Well, it’s not exactly the citizen science advocated by some of our readers, 1 but this is an interesting exercise in a sort of crowdsourcing. One hopes that variety-level information on the crop will be recorded at the same time as all that pest and disease stuff. And that the whole lot won’t be behind some paywall.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfEfxLcgHk4&feature=player_embeddedSpoiled by choice: Food crisis or malnutrition?
Cancel any plans you may have for Thursday and Friday next week.
Starting at noon GMT on Thursday 14 April, the World Bank hosts a “global chat forum about the food crisis.” A quarter of an hour later, a hop, skip and jump away at the International Food Policy Research Institute, there’s a seminar on Prospects for Golden Rice under the rubric Leveraging Agriculture to Improve Human Nutrition. You can watch the IFPRI seminar as a live webcast, which should end at 17:45 GMT. Luckily the global chat forum is, at least as far as I can tell, scheduled to continue for 24 hours, so you may not miss too much. (You can always follow the Twitter hashtags #foodcrisis and #wblive.) And if you’re not too exhausted, there’ll be a live webcast of World Bank assembled experts discussing ideas submitted by the public starting at 14:00 GMT on Friday 15 April.
Serving, protecting, blogging
Our more skeptical readers will probably dispute it, but that’s a shot of this esteemed organ being publicized at the European Plant Genetic Resources Conference 2011, organized by Eucarpia, taking place in Wageningen as I write. 2 Apparently, the massed ranks of genebankers present were encouraged to blog away, echoing our recent exhortation to that effect. Welcome, everyone!
Tools for manipulators
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.