Category Archives: Uncategorized

Simplistic and Dangerous Models

Posted on 20/04/2020 by richard telford

A few weeks ago there were none. Three weeks ago, with an entirely inadequate search strategy, ten cases were found. Last Saturday there were 43! With three inaccurate data points, there is enough information to fit an exponential curve: the prevalence … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

COVID-19, climate and the plague of preprints

Posted on 28/03/2020 by richard telford

Many diseases have geographically variability in prevalence or seasonal variability in epidemics, which may, directly or indirectly, be causally related to climate. Unfortunately, the nature of the relationship with climate is not always clear. With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 4 Comments

Double diatoms

Posted on 16/05/2019 by richard telford

I am in awe of Dr Elisabeth Bik and her amazing ability and dedication to spotting duplications in images. A new thread on – what appears to be – an obviously photoshopped image by Andrzej N released by @NatGeoMagI guess … Continue reading →

Posted in Peer reviewed literature, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Funky ordination plots with ggvegan

Posted on 11/04/2019 by richard telford

Yesterday, I tweeted a photo of a ordination I plotted with ggvegan, and thought I should show how I made it. ggvegan and ggplot make it easy to make complex ordination plots pic.twitter.com/zmEal7W4Q8 — Richard Telford (@richardjtelford) April 10, 2019 … Continue reading →

Posted in R, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sunspots and raindrops

Posted on 19/02/2019 by richard telford

It is time, as the walrus said, to talk about another paper reporting an effect of solar variability on the Earth’s climate. Laurenz et al. (2019) correlate European country-scale precipitation data from CRU with the number of sunspots, a proxy … Continue reading →

Posted in Peer reviewed literature, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 5 Comments

The elevation of Lake Tilo

Posted on 15/10/2018 by richard telford

For my PhD, I studied the palaeolimnology of two lakes in the Ethiopian rift valley, using diatoms to reconstruct changes in the water chemistry of Lake Awassa, an oligosaline caldera lake which retains its low salinity despite having no effluent … Continue reading →

Posted in Data manipulation, Palaeohydrology, R, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Bergen: a year with some sunshine

Posted on 22/06/2018 by richard telford

May was glorious.  December less so. The data are from the Geofysisk Institutt in Bergen. Here is the code I used

Posted in climate, R, Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Statigraphic diagrams with ggplot

Posted on 18/05/2018 by richard telford

rioja::strat.plot is a great tool for plotting stratigraphic plots in R, but sometimes it is not obvious how to do something I want, perhaps a summary panel showing the percent trees/shrubs/herbs. Of course, I could extend strat.plot, but I do … Continue reading →

Posted in Data manipulation, R, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Package version control

Posted on 24/04/2018 by richard telford

One aspect of writing a manuscript that I find tedious is checking the versions of the R packages I used. So I wrote a small function to do this automatically. (I don’t use ​= as an assignment operator in my … Continue reading →

Posted in R, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Been scooped? A discussion on data stewardship

Posted on 26/02/2018 by richard telford

  At Climate of the Past, there is a pre-print by Darrell Kaufman and others on the data stewardship policies adopted by the PAGES 2k special issue. Abstract. Data stewardship is an essential element of the publication process. Knowing how … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 18 Comments