There are many tutorials online on how to perform a PCA in Python, but few on how to generate a biplot with conventional scalings. So I did one myself on a Nextjournal notebook. Enjoy!
https://nextjournal.com/essicolo/principle-component-analysis-and-biplots-in-python
Image source: cosmicskull.org
Get out your tie-dye t-shirt, your patchouli perfume and your incense, then press play to welcome the revelation of the cosmic skull in the form of a large glass dome confining a rainbow in Technicolor.
The computing platform Noteable recently created a plugin that allows interaction with ChatGPT. I opened a notebook, then dropped a dataset. I asked ChatGPT to generate the code in #Rstats to create an AI model on this data set. 30 seconds later, I had an optimized code. It's sick. It completely (and positively) upsets the way of teaching numerical computations. Rather than focusing on writing code, teaching should now focus more on the importance
In a survey of 791 articles in 5 scientific journals, about half of the articles misinterpreted the notion of p-value, yet a gold standard in science (for the wrong reasons). We will be able to really focus on training critical thinking and put aside the ability to type code!
Music is not solely inspirational. Composers use frameworks. Some use western music theory, and any of their respective numerous genre and forms, which comes with their own rich history, culture, rules and patterns. This notebook shows how musical rules and patterns can be extracted from particular mathematical objects called cellular automata. This concept is not new. Genius composer Iannis Xenakis might have been the first to popularize (or even to use) them in music with his orchestral work Horos in 1986 (Solomos, 2013). This article applies a rather simple method to compose nusic with cellular automata, and can be summarized in three steps.
Code is poetry, of course, but it is also music. The music21 Python package for computer musicology not only allows investigating musical scores with data science, but also to write your own scores with mathematical operations. Georges Dimitrov, composer and professor at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), created the arvo package, which includes well-known minimalistic mathematical operations on notes to create no less rich musical scores. In this notebook, I explain how to compose the piece just below with arvo and music21 with minimalistic procedural composition techniques. You will need to have intermediate understanding of the Python programming language and basic understanding of western music theory.
Almost two years ago, I began to write an article (in French but translatable) on the ecological impacts of organic agriculture compared to non-organic agriculture (called conventional). International data strongly supported the article, but I wished I had data from the Québec province (Canada) other than an institutional 2011 report, which itself admitted having very little data from Québec. Since then, I haven't read any really reliable Québec study... until my colleague from UQAC, Maxime Paré, wrote to me.
Hello Serge-Étienne, I hope you are well. I think our recent paper should interest you 😛. https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1eo0W3QCo9f8Lc (my translation from French)
The paper (Viana et al., 2022), of which Maxime Paré is co-author, compares the production of organic and conventional oats with a life cycle assessment.
The finite element method (FEM) is widely used in engineering to represent mechanisms in space and time. Its mathematical basis is pretty complicated, but some Python packages facilitate problem definition and solving. But don't think FEM is easy even with the simplest FEM package : deep learning is popcorn compared to FEM.
Although each ecologist approach ecological problems uniquely, most seem to cluster toward different philosophies.
Eco-traditionalism. (C) essicolo
weathercan to compute weather indices in Canada
When a colleague told me he assigned an undergrad student full-time to copy-paste historical weather data from Environment Canada, I searched into my files and found some code which I could format and share. The weathercan package, a gem written by Steffi LaZerte, allowed me to automate fetching tasks and save countless hours. All I had to provide was the spatial coordinates of my sites and, since my work was about agricultural data, time periods expressed as beginning of the season to harvest.