AAPA cities

The annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) takes place in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2013. After checking the website, I saw that the AAPA keeps a list of past meeting locations, among other things. How often have the meetings been held in different cities? I made a map to help out.

First, I had to capture the data from the PDF file on the AAPA website, then separate out the years and cities using regular expressions. The data table only specifies city names, so I had to use some judgment in classifying which US state (or North American country) the meeting took place in. This was relatively straightforward, as most meetings take place in big cities or well-known college towns. I then pulled geographic coordinates from each city’s Wikipedia entry.

The resulting tab-separated text file is available for download here. All cities up to 2015 (St. Louis) are included. The resulting map and the R code for generating it are below:

aapas

aapas <- read.table('aapas.txt',header=TRUE,sep='\t')

cities <- data.frame(city=names(table(aapas$city)),
   n=as.numeric(table(aapas$city)))

xy <- aapas[c('city','long','lat')]

cities <- unique(merge(cities,xy,by='city'))

## order cities so that biggest circles are plotted first
cities <- cities[order(cities$n,decreasing=TRUE),]

## choose from non-gray colors
cols <- colors()[-c(grep('grey',colors()),grep('gray',colors()))]

## match exact polygons to avoid over-expanding the map extent
polygons <- c('USA','USA:Alaska','Hawaii:Nihau','Hawaii:Kauai',
   'Hawaii:Oahu','Hawaii:Molokai','Hawaii:Lanai','Hawaii:Maui',
   'Hawaii:Kahoolawe','Hawaii:Hawaii','Canada','Mexico')

library(maps)

map(regions=polygons,exact=TRUE,fill=TRUE,col='lightgray')
map('state',add=TRUE)

## circle areas are proportionate to number of meetings
points(cities$long,cities$lat,pch=21,cex=sqrt(cities$n/pi),
   lwd=sqrt(cities$n/pi),bg=sample(cols,nrow(cities)))
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Swarms

How do swarms of pedestrians, each with unique origins and destinations, maintain order in crowded urban environments? An article in last week’s Sunday Times explores this question and describes (but never mentions by name) the “boids” model by Craig Reynolds. In this seminal model, free-thinking computerized individuals follow just three simple rules governing their steering behavior: separation, alignment, and cohesion. Once the individuals are set into motion, these three behavioral rules are amazingly sufficient for modeling organized group movement.




via igeo.jp

Variations of this model have been used to animate realistic group movements in video games and movies, as well as to simulate animal schools, flocks, and herds in ecological studies.

What movement rules do you follow? This holiday, as you pass through city streets, airports, or shopping malls, take note of the cues that you react to unconsciously. Could it be that our steering decisions are no more complicated than those made by fish?

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Watts, amps, and volts

At some point in your life, you may find yourself in dire need to centrifuge baboon blood during a power outage. Time is sensitive, so waiting for power to return is not an option. Luckily, you have a solar-powered system with a 90Ah/12V deep-cycle battery connected to a 400W inverter. Unluckily, you’ve already burned out an inverter due to your ignorance about electricity. How do you know your only remaining inverter can handle the job?

The answer is absurdly simple. Just remember this equation from high school physics:

Watts (W) = Volts (V) x Amps (A)

The tag on the power cord tells you that the centrifuge draws up to 2.2 amps. The AC output on your inverter is 110 volts. Multiplying these two numbers tells you that the maximum power running through this system is about 242 watts, well under the 400W rating of your inverter.

This is good news, as you can now stop doing this.

hand centrifuge

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New links in blogroll

Three new links added to the blogroll today, all of them from good friends and colleagues in primatology:

Chris is Evopropinquitous and keeps probably the most entertaining blog by a primatologist or any other field biologist. His stories cover the cute, the bizarre, the educational, and especially the disgusting aspects of being a field biologist. And they’re all 100% true. io9 wrote the following about Chris’ writing:

Our new favorite Tumblr is scientific, graphic and hilariously tragic. It also features fluffy monkey scrota.

What more could you ask for?

Christina is Monkeyologist and writes about primates and other critters in the field, the laboratory, and in the news. She is easily one of the top computer geeks in primatology and regularly posts her excellent programming tips and examples for both research computing and everyday tasks.

News from Kinda Camp contains updates from the Kasanka Baboon Project. The Kasanka Baboon Project is the first major long-term project monitoring the behavior of kinda baboons (Papio kindae), one of the newest and least-known varieties of baboon and, incidentally, one of the baboon species involved in my research. Aside from its scientific aims, the Kasanka project also does important community development and conservation education work. Visit the website for more information.

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Pioneer Camp

I write this from Pioneer Camp, where I am staying during my limited time in Lusaka. Actually, Pioneer Camp is just outside of Lusaka, northeast of the city. I arrived with fellow baboon researcher Monica yesterday night, after a fairly smooth trip starting in St. Louis and passing through Atlanta and Johannesburg.

Living conditions in our cottage at Pioneer are pretty luxurious. We have two rooms with three beds each. There is a mosquito net above each bed, which drapes over each edge like a curtain. This is my first experience with mosquito nets, and sitting in bed shut in by the mosquito net talking to a cloudy-looking Monica makes me feel rather like a Roman princess. This carried over to my sleep, in which I was reportedly uttering . . . well, we will keep that area private for now. Surely there will be more Lariam-induced adventures later on!

Outside of the cottage, you can see a glimpse of the Miombo woodland environment that is well-represented over all of Zambia. One botanical book here says that 80% of Zambia is Miombo environment, the most for any country in Africa. This is my first time in southern Africa and savanna country, but it certainly looks different from anything I’ve seen before, with tall grasses and lots of trees that are not quite dense enough to be a forest. You can almost imagine monkeys and other large wildlife passing through here, but an electric fence surrounding Pioneer Camp, presumably to keep out livestock, makes that difficult.

Nights here are cold and days are hot. Mid-day recorded the highest temperature, which was probably around 80 F. Outside of those times, however, the weather seems to strike the perfect balance between hot and cold. There is ample sunlight and shade here, so there are few excuses for spending time indoors!

For the next few days, we will be in Pioneer and Lusaka waiting for the last member of our baboon team and planning some logistical details for our trip to baboon camp in the Chunga area of Kafue National Park. Our camp site appears to fall near one of the major roads in Zambia about 1-2 hours outside of Lusaka along that road. The traveling time once offroad, however, is impossible to say and we’re expecting several hours tacked on before we reach Chunga.

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