Tag: Trees

There is a steep hill directly across the street from my house. High and narrow, it stands about 75 feet tall. The road stretches like a dark ribbon between where my yard stops and the hill begins. The hill is too precarious to build anything on. For the twenty-two years that I’ve been in t...

From a young age, my family travelled to Mexico for yearly vacations. My grandparents had a timeshare and my first experience with Mexico was in a stereotypical resort for tourists in Mazatlán. My mom would strap on my lifejacket and I would zip down the waterslide, dive from the rocks, and e...

Why is this? A quick scan of some of the leafiest neighborhoods might reveal some possibilities. Generally, these areas are known for being wealthier and whiter than those with fewer trees. But does the data tell a similar story, or is it just our imagination? Perhaps, then, we should t...

Welcome to the Friday Data Story, where on Friday we choose an open data set and tell a story about it. This week, we are looking at the trees in Paris. Our technical focus this week is the plotly sunburst function. Questions to answer What is the taxonomy of the trees in Paris? What is t...

When I first moved to Taipei, there was no bilingual Mandarin/English improv group. I arrived having only one friend, Olof, a tall Swede who enjoys the time-stretch of awkward moments and is still very much an important part of my life to this day. It was improv that had first connected us, and it i...

Predictive policing is not a new idea. In fact, it’s one that comes with understandable controversy! Early predictive policing was partly inspired by the advanced analytics in E-commerce domains. Wal-Mart and Amazon were early adopters of using user statistics to anticipate emerging trends, an...

If you grew up reading Dr. Seuss, you likely remember the tall, spindly “Truffula” trees from The Lorax, with striped trunks and colorful pompom foliage. People have long debated Theodor Seuss Geisel’s inspiration for these beloved trees, with some believing that a Califo...

For those of us who love the woods, trees are a constant source of wonder. The forest giants can tower over you wherever you are, but the trees in certain parts of the world absolutely dwarf the rest. Some of the tallest trees on Earth can be found in the inaccessible tropics of Borneo and the an...

Because our neighboring nations have so much in common culturally, you can sometimes almost forget that you’ve traveled to another country when visiting Canada from the United States. But after spending much of the last year fighting the efforts of the Trump administration to undermine our env...

The ISFR reports present lots of stats, but in this thread, I focus on the headline statistic: trends in India’s total forest cover over time. So, let’s go… here, in one graph, is a 35-year summary of the official line on India’s forest cover: from 1999, it has been nonst...

There’s a saying among Buddhist circles that captures the differences between three of the most popular Buddhist traditions: “Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.” The saying is imperfect, as generalizations tend to be, but there’s ...

About 2500 years ago, a young royal prince, Siddhartha Gautama, embarked on a profound spiritual journey. Having lived his early years, never having witnessed problems of old age, sickness, poverty, or death, he renounced his opulent lifestyle and began his search for truth. Following the traditi...

Let’s pretend for a second that Machine Learning models are real human beings: none of them is perfect (besides you, of course). Some models could be too anxious, someone too jealous, someone too arrogant. The real magic happens when you fall in love with someone that is able to s...

A phylogenetic tree is a branching diagram that shows the evolutionary relationships among species or groups of organisms. It is often depicted as a diagram with branches, nodes, and tips/terminal nodes. The branches represent the lineages or evolutionary paths of species, while the nodes indicate t...

Ten years later when I was teaching science to high school students at Jakarta International School, my ecology students and the geology students did a field trip to Anak Krakatau, a small island around the Krakatau volcano in the Sunda Straits between the Indonesian Islands of Java and Sumatra. Whe...

Boosted Regression Trees (from now on BRTs) is a kind of regression methodology based on Machine Learning. Unlike conventional regression methods (GLMs, GAMs), BRTs combine numerous basic decision trees to enhance the predictive performance. BRTs can handle complex relationships and interaction...

You’re a Data Scientist in training. You’ve come a long way from writing your first line of Python or R code. You know your way around Scikit-Learn like the back of your hand. You spend more time on Kaggle than Facebook now. You’re no stranger to building awesome random forests and...

Old trees in the city often stand along the street, with people interact with them without any close contact. In many cases, people simply breathe in the oxygen that trees produce and enjoy the shade that the leafy canopies provide. However, if you happened to be walking through some of the old dist...