James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

February 10, 2010

The top ten instutitions attending the 52nd Maize Meeting this March

Filed under: Fun With Numbers — Tags: — James @ 11:54 am

As determined by the domain names of 402 e-mail addresses that were recently revealed.

  1. Cornell University
  2. Google <– gmail.com was the second most common domain name among these e-mail addresses.
  3. Cold Spring Harbor
  4. University of Guelph
  5. Iowa State University
  6. University of California-Berkeley
  7. University of Florida
  8. UMR de Génétique Végétale du Moulon*
  9. (8) Purdue University*
  10. Syngenta

Overall a total of 134 organizations (or at least domain names) were represented in the list of e-mail addresses of attendees in my possession. If I could dig up historical data it’d be interesting to see how the rankings change over time.

Doing this sort of analysis very quickly (generating the data for this post took ~4 minutes, I timed myself) is one of the fringe benefits of learning even a little about programming.

Official 52nd Maize Meeting website.

(You see what happens when a guy has too much caffeine and then has a chunk of time too short to get any real work done?!)

*These two institutions are tied for number of attendees

3 Comments »

  1. Yes. Perl can be useful for a variety of tasks. A little know-how can go a long way and save alot of time from what could be tedious work.

    Also, very cool for me to see University of Guelph up there before some other very big names. Any idea why? Its not in Guelph or something is it?

    (did my undergrad at Guelph)

    Comment by Greg — February 10, 2010 @ 2:18 pm

  2. The maize meeting is going to be in Italy this year so I can tell you for sure it isn’t proximity. I remember running into a number of really cool grad students from Guelph at the previous maize meeting (the first one I’d ever been to), including one whose research effectively scooped the project I’d been working on during my rotation.

    Without any historical data it’s hard to say if they just have a lot of people doing interesting stuff with corn, or if there’s something different about this year.

    Comment by James — February 10, 2010 @ 2:34 pm

  3. Bummer on the scoop.

    There are some really great plant researchers at Guelph. I hope to end up back there my self one way or another. It could be high on the list because, I suppose, it would have one of the highest concentration of corn researchers in Canada. The US probably proportionately has more corn researchers but they could be spread across several institutes as evident from the top ten list.

    Comment by Greg — February 10, 2010 @ 10:00 pm

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