Siliceous and Delicious

Beaudry

Progress on Deliverables

See the posting on Beau’s website.

Deliverables

1. Implement multi-year cropping for Alfalfa: this will require some delicate changes to the budgeting and crop planning structures in the Farmer agent, as well as some work in the Crop and Farm objects. I’m going to try and tread lightly, since these elements have by far caused me the most trouble during development, and I’m a little loathe to make dramatic changes…
2. Add in weather events to the model: this will require finding appropriate week-scale datasets for weather, hopefully on a regional basis, from 1999-2007. After that, though, it should be relatively straight forward to implement logic relating the weather to soil moisture and hence farmer decision making.
3. Other miscellaneous loose ends.

Ben

Progress on Deliverables

1. Started dissolution of Australia samples. Have now run out of acid, so can not dissolve samples any further, but dissolution is progressing a little faster than with the Ohio samples.
2. OmniFocusenization completed. This is tremendously helpful, but I have found that this new form of organization—combining OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and a strict iCal schedule, makes the Planning/Context duality of OmniFocus somewhat superfluous. iCal tells me what project I should be working on, OmniPlan tells me what part of the project I should be working on, and the project task break-down in OmniFocus planning mode tells me what task I should be doing: this makes the context mode of OmniFocus somewhat unnecessary.
3. First look accomplished, but no more beyond that. Made it clear that I need to step through the code line-by-line, following closely along with the methods description in the paper.
4. Radiolarian sample list preparation stymied by Papers set-up activation energy. No progress here.
5. ODP MRC database found and downloaded, but not looked at yet. Contacted Zoe and requested samples from her—talked on the phone Wednesday morning and agreed on authorship (she will be co-author on any papers arising) and samples (she will send samples for which she has surplus material, within the next few weeks).

Deliverables

1. Progress on sample list for radiolarian project (at least have carried out searches for Cambrian and Ordovician papers).
2. Buy more HCl for the radiolarian dissolutions.
3. Talk to Jc about having thin sections of Ohio samples made.
4. Download catalogue of Mesozoic radiolaria, take a look at picture quality, brainstorm about potential measurements to make.
5. Start going through Rabosky’s R code in detail.
6. Look through ODP publications & do quick literature search to see what data there are about radiolarian/diatom chert distributions through time.