Got it. Last week I finished the programming work for something I’d call hierarchical agglomerative average-linkage clustering with spatial constraints. Seems complicated, sounds complicated, but the R-code is something around 300 lines long. The exact reasoning for why I did what is going to be in one of the next papers. Nevertheless, two illustrative videos emerged.

In preparation of my thesis defence, I recently gave two more or less local talks at our university. The first took place on Jan 14th 2010, as part of the DKE-Doktorandenkolloquium. My talk covered the three major parts of my dissertation, namely the introduction of spatial cross-validation for yield prediction, variable importance measurements and a spatial clustering approach tailored to precision agriculture data. My direct supervisor happened to be there and gave me positive feedback and some things to waterproof for a final defence presentation of my thesis. Some questions could be preempted or at least I could prepare (for) the answers beforehand. The slides:slides-russ2010dkekoll.pdf.

Then, in fulfillment of our institute’s formal requirements for obtaining a PhD title, I gave my talk at the Doktorandentag on Feb 02 2010, which is some kind of preparatory talk for the final defence. Again, my talk went much better than the one before, even though it was heavily shortened. I guess there was some talk routine now, after the numerous conferences I went to. It seems that this was the second talk I gave in German during my PhD time. That’s why the slides are in German, too: slides-russ2010dday.pdf.
Read the rest of this entry »