I contacted Charlie’s postdoc, Natalie Cooper, who is a friend of mine about the primate parasite data. They are starting a workshop today and will be too busy to talk about the data. Natalie suggested I email Charlie again next week. In any way, I think this will get sorted out. Worst comes to worst, we can always use the old carnivore parasite data, although they are a bit out of date.
Before the data get sorted out, I can still start writing some R codes. I dug out some codes for doing Random Forests and GLM in R, and the codes for illustrating results from these models. These are two methods for looking at multivariates that I find very easy to understand and to conduct in R, and the outcomes are pretty straightforward (at least to me :]).
I will be travelling next week for some collaboration, and I will be giving my very first real seminar talk on Tuesday in University of Oldenburg, Germany, in English (of course). It will be a departmental seminar, so I have to spend some time preparing for it. This trip might be a good opportunity to get some fresh phylogenetic data for our modules, too. Last time I checked, evolutionary distinctiveness of host species is a very strong correlate with parasite species richness. It might be nice to include in the module as well, so that we have ecological traits and evolutionary traits.
Looks great Shan! Good luck with your talk on Tuesday.