Welcome to Quentin's blog of ideas on ecology, sustainability, and R code! To see old blog posts that Q wrote before 2019, please visit Q's old blog. Important note: Quentin expresses his own views and opinions on this blog. They do not represent the official position of the United States Department of Agriculture.
I just got back from AgStats 2023 (Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture and Natural Resources) held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, my first foray into an applied agricultural stats conference. Read more
Data and code need to be freely and publicly available for science to have its fullest impact. USDA is working on it but is still playing catch-up. Read more
Recently we published a study about how food waste and food consumption in the United States affect biodiversity around the globe. In this post I’ll tell a little bit about the study, what we found, and an interesting headline that came out about it. Read more
To make science better, we need to change the way we interpret and analyze data, moving away from black-and-white yes-or-no answers and towards describing the full range of what we believe to be true. Read more
In October 2021 I started a new job as an applied statistician for the Agricultural Research Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As promised here are a few musings on my 6-month anniversary of becoming an employee of the federal government. Read more
The cynical lobbyist Grover Norquist is quoted as saying “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Read more
I just learned that today, April 24, is Stop Food Waste Day, which a number of organizations are promoting. In order to get in on the fun, I hastily jotted down these thoughts about our ongoing food waste work. Read more
It’s impossible to spend much time here at SESYNC without hearing the term “wicked problem.” I wasn’t familiar with the term when I first got here, so I quickly read up on it. Read more
Food waste is the trademark problem of our culture of abundance. Pouring huge proportions of our precious land, soil, water, and energy resources into producing food, and inflicting damage on the environment in the process, is necessary to maintain human life. Read more