Arrgh

First of all, I spent the majority of my last three days at work trying to learn a new computer language for statistical analysis and mostly for population simulations. I figured it out! Its called Program R. Here is some sample Code:

sims <- 1000
aSia <- 62.47249
bSia <- 22.29344
aSii <- 52.53239
bSii <- 56.91009
Sia <- matrix( , sims, 1)
Sii <- matrix( , sims, 1)

for(i in 1:sims){
Sia[i] <- rbeta(1, aSia, bSia)
Sii[i] <- rbeta(1, aSii, bSii)
}

Yummy isn't it? This brief bit of code selects 1000 pseudo-random values of Adult and immature survival from beta distributions that are based on empirically derived means and variances. Heretofore I used Visual Basic for this sort of thing but R is a much more efficient code and a faster program. I am very pleased with my self.

Also yeah for the Boston Celtics! Though I like Gasol and Odom as players, I really dislike the Lakers.

Plus, after only two weeks, I have no idea how I managed to live my life with out Tivo.

Lastly, Silver Jews new album came out yesterday and I forgot to down load it last night. Whoops...I'll get right to it.

1358

An actual title of an article in the spring issue of the Wilson Journal of Ornithology:

"Specimen shrinkage in Cinnamon Teal"

UPDATE: I read the article...it is not a funny as it sounds.

Working man.

I am a working man now. I arrive at the office at about 8:20am I leave by about 4:30. I am busy pretty much all day long with work related things, like tracking down papers on Horseshoe crab population dynamics, or reading book chapters on objective functions and optimization techniques. I've also been working on a new paper about sampling variance and how it affects wildlife population models, and I've been having meetings about other research and writing opportunities, and getting safety trained in things like, how to drive and how to use the internets safely. I have determined that blogs may not be a safe use of the internet, namely I don't want my bosses to know about this blog so I don't want to be writing to it from work. Thus posting content and frequency suffers. You should probably go find something funny or interesting to read. Besides I declared months ago that May 2008 would be the end of Dis-traction, yet here I am posting still. What am I, Hillary Clinton? Ha! I kill me.

We're in Delaware...

I've been in Delaware for a week or so. Well, Delaware and New Jersey to be exact but it was southern, rural New Jersey, which minus the WaWa markets it was basically Delaware. I was there to trap birds and do some Horseshoe crab sampling. The Delaware Bay has the highest density of Horseshoe crabs of anywhere in the world, they come up the beach at high tide enmasse, the females dig nests and lay thier eggs by the millions. The shorebirds, migrating northward from South America to the Canadian Arctic, stop off enmasse in the Delaware bay for about 3 weeks every spring and gorge them selves on the Horseshoe crab eggs. It really is one of those wonders of nature that help me to love life. The is basically the system that I am studying and modeling for my post-doc research. Here is a picture that I took of spawning crabs at high tide on Monday morning.