data analysis

You may have seen a few posts about #rturf on my personal site. I’m writing about that topic over there so I don’t clutter up the ATC site with too much data analysis and computer code.

I recently completed an analysis of Turf Twitter in 2019, with the searchable results in this Shiny app. Based on the number of followers, mentions of the account, the favorites and retweets and quotes of that accounts’ tweets, and the number of tweets sent from the account, these are the top 50 “influential” accounts for 2019:

Yesterday I responded to two questions related to carbon emissions associated with electricity generation. This was part of a broader discussion started by Jason Haines about small electric autonomous mowers.

Sean Heath wrote with this question: “do you or anyone else know of data being tracked for sunlight or cloud cover? Specifically how much sunlight did Northern VA receive this year with all the rain and cloud cover?

A year ago, I looked at a selection of turfgrass industry accounts and ranked them in the Turf Twitter 2017 analysis based on a combination of followers, tweet creation rate, favorites of the tweets sent from the account, retweets of the tweets sent from the account, and mentions of the account.

I did this analysis in 2016 and repeated it in 2018. I figure that tweets by the golf course superintendent, Alejandro Reyes (@Reyes_golf), or tweets that mention the golf course superintendent, must be about the course maintenance.

A couple months ago I was struck by this post—“Problems with surrogate markers”—on Andrew Gelman’s blog. “Wow”, I thought, “this seems related to turfgrass management in a lot of ways.”

On August 23 at 4 a.m., Andrew McDaniel and I walked into a 7-11 in Fukuoka to get the latest issue of Weekly Golf Digest. Golf magazines in Japan are pretty amazing to begin with.

Allan Dewald posted a poll on Twitter, asking how many other superintendents on Twitter are using the MLSN guidelines. The results of the poll, with 93 votes, were 41% using MLSN, 38% using conventional guidelines, and 21% not soil testing.

The KBC Augusta tournament is coming up next week at Keya Golf Club in Fukuoka. The volume of grass clippings cut from the greens is measured every morning. I think it is interesting to look at the density of the measurements.