Algae people!

I attended my second scientific conference in five weeks (also my second conference EVER) this weekend: the 50th anniversary symposium of the Northeast Algal Society at Woods Hole. As might be expected from a group that focuses on algae, this was a much smaller, intimate conference than the Benthic Ecology Meeting, and they gave everyone a full list of attendees' names, affiliations and contact information. AKA graphable data. So here we go...

I wanted to look at where people were from, i.e. which institutions sent the most algae people out to Woods Hole. This graph is something similar to a rank abundance curve, with institutions ranked by the number of attendees on the abscissa and the number of attendees on the ordinate (the terms 'abscissa' and 'ordinate' make me happy because though they are so ridiculously obscure). The institutions with the biggest contingents were: University of New Brunswick, UConn, URI, UNH and Northeastern. I was the only one from Brown :)


Here is a plot of how far people were from their home institution. It is based on point to point distance measurements in Google Earth, so it most certainly underestimates the actual distance traveled by each person (especially because Cape Cod is a funny shape).


Woods Hole is awesome and today was sunny so I was very happy. Here is a picture from near the conference building.