Good News and Scary News:

I have been busy trying to finish a few things before heading out to Ecuador again. A paper that I submitted to Conservation Biology needed to be revised, some of the data had to be re-analysed and I spent the best part of two weeks getting my head around the new analysis and re-incorporating all the suggestions the reviewers had made. I also had to make sure that I managed to get a letter of inquiry ready for a grant we want to submit to the MacArthur Foundation. So things have been a bit stressy.

My aunt sent me an email today, telling me about a young scientist doing research on howler monkeys, who was mistakenly shot and killed in Ecuador. This is the article that appeared in yesterdays edition of the International Herald Tribune, which is slightly unnerving. Apart from the fact that this is a great tragedy, I am not sure what to think. It's not anywhere near where we work but people in rural areas have guns, that's a given. I guess my health and safety tip for anyone working in the field is to make sure we tell people who we are and what we are doing. One benefit of doing the social science as well as the biology part is that our research is inherently linked with people and we make sure that we always get consent from the people we interview and who's land we will be on. I guess these stories make sure that you are extra carefull.

On the brighter side, the doctor gave me the all clear on my back. I started getting sharp pains in back while in Ecuador a few months ago. I just thought that it was strain of lifting heavy equipment, particularly things like gas tanks which I reckon can be about 35 - 45 kg when full. They continued over christmas and when Nathan was diagnosed with the flesh eating disease leishmaniasis I though it more prudent to get it checked out. Misty (my partner, who is a medical doctor) agreed. I got a set of x-rays done and a scintigraphy, which is when they inject you with radio-active dye and then photograph your skeleton to look for abnormal bone activity. Anyway, both the x-ray and the scintigraphy came back ok, which was a relief and the doctor said that the pain was probably muscular. 

It's official I fly out to Ecuador on the 2nd of March and return on the 14th. Although the meeting is only on from the 9th - 11th I want to make use of the time to tie up a few loose ends and photograph a few things that I didn't get the chance shoot on the last trip. I also found a new blog today! It's published by the NY Times and is called Dot Earth. It is written by Andrew Revkin with the support of grant from the Guggenheim foundation (I wanna get me one of those someday).  The blog makes an interesting read. One entry in particular links in Lydia Polgreen's piece on infrastructure development in Gabon by looking at road networks in the Brazilian Amazon. One of the latest entries looks at armed conflicts and environmental protection after reading a recent paper published in the journal Conservation Biology. Revkin's entry makes the very valid point that as natural resources start to dwindle, global warming kicks and more people start to migrate as a consequence conflicts, might intensify.

On Data

In many cases quantitative information relies on statistical interpretations to highlight trends in what seem to be a bunch of abstract numbers. Most people will probably encounter statistics when faced with election polls or census data. In the run-up to the US election statisticians for both the democrats and republicans where most probably vetting the odds of winning the election by taking into account a whole bunch of 'voting' minorities; the African-American vote, the womens vote, the latino vote, the youth vote etc... They were probably asking questions like:  what is the likelyhood of Obama wining the state Ohio if he gets 86% of the womens vote in, let's say, the state of Colorado? Or, what is the likely-hood that Latino women will vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin? Latino women, obviously falling into the categories of both women voters an Latino voters. 

Statistics is daunting and getting a grasp of it as quantitative scientist is, (un)fortunately compulsory - depending on whether you are the graduate student who is tearing his hair out in frustration or the public who rely on politicians taking (or not) the advice of the scientific community (see the preCOP9 conference in 2008 where scientists strived to make some recommendations to the parties taking part in the meeting). 

Although statistics relies on mathematical equations to define the odds of an event happening or a relationship existing, they also depend on graphs and figures to display statistical trends succinctly. Perhaps more importantly, because we are a species largely relying on our eyesight, it is important for our understanding to display these results visually. And here lies the problem. In many cases graphs and figures are, to the untrained eye, illegible. The British government and many Universities (see this for one of Manchester's attempts) are trying to spur scientists to take a more active role in engaging the public and making science more accessible to wider audiences. When speaking to my friend Paul (Finn) about my idea for a book about my work in Ecuador I was struck by his interest in data and visually representing data. Paul is a graphic designer who loves fronts (listen to this if you want to laugh at him expressing his love for fonts to the BBC's Saturday Live). Talking to him made me realize that there is not a lot of stuff out there, specifically aiming to look at data and focusing on it's visual representation, particularly in the natural sciences. The NY Times does very well at exploring new media and data and I have selected three pieces which I think are very good.

> The Ebb and Flow of Movies

> China's Environmental Crisis

> Election Day

There's an interesting piece in today's IHT by Lydia Polgreen. The title of the article is "Profiteers turn to an African Eden". I have tried to look it up on the IHT website and the NY Times but no luck - perhaps it will be there tomorrow. The article highlights the role of extractive industries (e.g. mining, logging and oil) in conservation. While it makes use of Gabon as a recent example to underline the effect of infrastructure expansion road construction by companies working in remote places is nothing new. Oil companies in Brazil and Ecuador, for example, have been doing so for decades. The newly built roads usually provide access to formerly inaccessible areas. Their construction is usually followed by rural migrants who claim frontier land and settle down to farm, often with dire consequences for the environment. There's a very good article by Tom Rudel in the scientific journal Human Ecology. It makes for an interesting read if you want to know more about the subject.

Road construction in the Province of Orellana, Ecuador (2006)