Current Obsession- Non Biology Post

Will do a post about my misadventure with logistic regression in R this week.

But guess what I'm obsessed with.

La Clamenza di Tito. A grossly underrated opera by Mozart. Rumored to have been written in just ten days!

The basic gist of this rondo is like "I might be sending my boyfriend to his death, now I gotta wrestle with my decision in this 10 minute aria"

Also obsessed with L'incoronazione di Poppea. One of the earliest operas featuring Emperor Nero. Yes, the really terrible one. Here, he and his mistress (now Empress) sings this beautiful love duet.

The basic gist of the duet is "We're in love and we'll be happy forever. Until one day, you kick my pregnant belly and me and our child dies,"

Dinocampus Coccinellae

Coolest ladybeetle parasitoid.

Dinocampus Coccinellae (Family: Braconidae)
Was on National Geographics front cover some months ago.

Already gave a name for the wasp that is about to emerge.

Callas. 

 Then try to get a population of wasps going.

(Source: Damie Pak)

Interesting?

Chao and Pararasitm Rate?
Can Parasitoid Diversity drive successful Parasitism Rate?

Running a GLM. The dependent variable is rather a wasp or a leafminer emerged from the leafminer pupae collected at different farm sites. So if a wasp emerged: successful! If a leafminer emerged: failure! Using a GLM with binomial distribution (binary outcomes) and putting in some important local and landscape variables...

Whamo.

A strong correlation between successful parasitism event and parasitoid diversity  (Chao Estimator.)

Interestingly.

Odds Ratio

Basically, a high- shade farm has 0.277 times the odds of a low-shade farm to have a successful parasitism event.

Still working on this (needs a lot of work) and making sure the model is okay, but still some pretty interesting results.

Pssst- Parasitoid wasps benefit from shade tree size and landscape complexity in Mexican coffee agroecosystems download

Download
Parasitoid wasps benefit from shade tree size and landscape complexity in Mexican coffee agroecosystems from my Penn State Site

Does parasitism richness drive parasitism rate? Puerto Rico Farms

I'm kinda shaky in answering this question but here's what I found So I plotted the species richness of parasitoid wasps at a site versus the parasitism proportion (In this case, of all the leaf-miner pupae that were retrieved at a site, how many wasps emerged rather than leaf miners).

I split the points into two groups (high intensification sites and low intensification sites).

Nothing came up when using a linear model.

Humor- Being pushed out of my comfort zone

Using R makes sense to me.
I mean bam- you have a place to code and you have a console.
Bam! You can see the files in your working directory and bam! You know the variables in your environment

R is great.

It's free. It's simple.
With my love of analogies, I just have to say:
R is that nice guy. He's not flashy (At times he can be) and he's available to everyone.

The first time using Mathematica I felt like I was tossed into another level.

My thoughts as I tried to navigate:

"Where's the console?"
"Wait, how do you run this? CTRL- R? SHIFT-tab, what sorcery is that"

"Where's the little area where it shows you the working directory and the variables you're using?"
"I mean the graphs are beautiful, but what is with the brackets"
"What, is parenthesis too good for Mathematica? What is their fetish for brackets?"

But the first step is always hard,

Though come on, when did society state that

[] is better than ()?