Michael Jahn

In a few days starts the 11th European workshop on the biology of cyanobacteria. It was planned to take place in beautiful Porto, Portugal. I was very much looking forward to this as I haven’t been on a conference for a whole year. But unfortunately COVID-19 forced the conference organizers to turn it into a digital meeting. This is not as exciting as visiting a real conference (and a new city!) and meeting people in person, but I’m nevertheless looking forward to it.

The corona virus crisis has overshadowed the life of many EU citizens for quite some time now, and will likely continue to do so for the coming months. The strict social distancing measures taken by many governments leave work places deserted, factories standing still and shops closed. However, one small country on the Northern edge of Europe is going it’s own way to tackle the CoV pandemic and it is highly interesting how this experiment will turn out. None the least as I am part of that experiment.

The famous ggplot2 package for R has numerous packages extending its basic plot functions, including ggrepel that draws nice text labels for each point of a scatterplot. But I am using lattice for many years now, and came to like its look and customization options. However, one thing I was missing all the time is a simple one-line function to add small text labels to points in a scatter plot (a.k.a. dot plot, a.k.a. xyplot() in lattice).

My github activity is in free fall, my email response time is at least two days, and my stress level is lower than usual. What has happened, am I on vacation? Not quite, I’m in the middle of a five month parental leave with my almost one year old daughter Sophie. So far it’s been a joyful but also challenging time. Here are some thoughts about my own parental leave, about the conditions here in Sweden, and a comparison with other European countries.

Before we dive directly into the fun of making treemaps, one word regarding the past, present and future of this blog. The last post I made is around one year ago (so much for the past). Many things have happened in this year, first and foremost that I became father for the second time. Both family life and my professional life as researcher at Science for Life Lab in Stockholm do in fact leave only limited time for extra activities, like this blog. This is a bit sad for me, but I see it as a temporary issue. I’m still more than dedicated to this blog (present) and will try to post more regularly in the future. Particularly because so many interesting things are happening in the data sciences, and these things have also changed the way I conduct my research and work with data. Just to name of few, I started using github and making my own R packages. I want to write and publish my data analysis pipelines as R markdown notebooks. I want to get more familiar with machine learning, and so on. All of these developments are worth their own posts, but now I start with: treemaps.