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.

In and out

I've been scrambling to catch up with everything ever since I got back from the Benthic Ecology Meeting five days ago so I haven't had the time to mess around with data and graphs. But now it's spring break, and even though I have a to-do list as long as my arm, there's some time to play around with excel.

Like most conferences that aren't tiny, Benthics has concurrent sessions (4 of them) and they were close enough that it was very easy to switch from one session to another between talks. Each session had 5-10 talks, so 4-9 potential switches in total. Here is a graph of how much switching we all did (as a proportion of how many possible switches there were):

FYI, we are almost but not 'significantly different' from each other (p~0.09). Though I bet if I just ran a paired test between me and Jason we'd be different. I think I just want to believe that I am significantly different from smelly Jason :)

And below is another graph of switches (again, proportion of total possible), this time by session. Yes, there was one session in which I switched rooms at every possible time, though I think it was mostly moving back and forth between two of the rooms.


Also, 2 great graph ideas that may never see the light of ordinate and abscissa:

1. I wanted to graph our individual paths and movements between sessions, but we moved around and crossed between rooms so much that the graph is just a crazy mess of lines which fails to convey the point. Even the above graph (switching by section) is a little but crazy and falls on the very limit of what I consider worth graphing.

2. If I could figure out which combination of talks each person at Benthics attended, I could use some kind of ordination technique (I'm not sure exactly which would be most suitable) to characterise each person relative to everyone else based on that. Then people who cluster together would probably have similar interests and should talk to each other => awesome way to network, right? But it's kind of lame to do this when I only have data for 4 people. Maybe if I go to Benthics again next year I will try and do this...

Networking at Benthics

(estimated in approximate number of hours spent)

I think we are all terrible at networking.

From the Benthics Meeting...

Out of 22.5 hours, this is the breakdown:

So ridiculously tired. But so worth it. The conference starts for real tomorrow!

Also: Mobile, AL is a pretty little city.