Hey its been a while XD I finally am getting around to computing some of the data analysis while I have time during my recovery from top surgery. With that being said, to increase the likliness of putting *anything* out, as I crunch the numbers and what not, I'll post them in updates.
With that being said, while I'd like to invest the time into doing proper statistic measures to test statistical significance, I am currently Too Lazy to do that for a small fun project. Maybe if I get bored and have time I will properly run those statistics, but for now, yall can get what you get
This is the data from question eight, which asked for favourite characters to read about in order of preference.
The most characters listed by one respondent was ten, so i assigned the spot of first on anyones list ten points, second favourite nine points, etcetera, and tallied all of these
here are the top ten characters:
Here are how all of them match up:
I also counted favorite, or allotted one point for every time they were the number one character:
and finally by mention, so one point for every time they were on someones list, regardless of placement on that list. for this one i eliminated characters mentioned only once:
apologies for some hard to read text lol.
but yeah gawain won every time, which is typical gawain huh. weve also learned that lancelot is widely liked, but no ones favorite, which is neat.
Algorithms and hi-res survey data lead to census of desert shrub in Nevada
- By University of Texas at Austin -
The creosote is the king of the desert. This scraggly shrub dominates the landscape of the American southwest, creating mini-oases from the harsh heat for desert wildlife. In a new study, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin leveraged computer algorithms and high-resolution survey data to conduct the first-ever creosote census – counting every creosote in a 135-square-mile conservation site in Nevada’s Mojave Desert.
The final count was 23 million creosotes among a total population of 66 million plants.
Image: Creosote plants in Las Vegas Valley.A recent University of Texas at Austin study used aerial survey data and computer algorithms to conduct the first ever census of the desert plant. Credit: Michael Young.
The researchers discovered important new information about the plant species, but they also demonstrate how data techniques can improve on conventional methods for studying plant communities.
“This was first and foremost a big data project,” said James “Jake” Gearon, a graduate student at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who led the study. “The majority of time was data cleaning, data investigation, data prep. By the time you get to analysis, you have discovered so many things along the way you have a path forward.”
The study was published in November 2020 in the journal Landscape Ecology.
The census is a milestone for plant science. Most plant population data comes from samples of fewer than 1,000 plants or aerial surveys that capture community snapshots. This research presents a way to account for each and every individual in a plant community. The scientists also discovered that certain landscape features can influence how big creosotes grow and how far apart they are spaced.
“People are amazed at the size of the dataset. But we tried to avoid being dazzled by size and focus on the interesting things the data tell us,” said coauthor Michael Young, a senior research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology, a research unit at the Jackson School.
The creosote research is built on repurposed data collected by Young and colleagues during a 2017 aerial survey that collected aerial photos and elevation data from the Boulder City Conservation Easement in the Mojave Desert.
Image: Creosotes (larger plants) and white bursage (smaller plants) cover the ground in Nevada’s Boulder City Conservation Easement. Credit: Young et al.
The data were originally collected to find burrows belonging to the threatened desert tortoise. But the high-resolution photos (one pixel is equivalent to six inches) combined with the elevation data that measured variations in each square meter of the easement, created a rich resource for new research.
Counting the creosotes involved applying computer algorithms that could distinguish the bushes from the surrounding landscape and other plants. In addition to carrying out the census, the algorithms also extracted information on each creosote’s location, height, and canopy area, from which canopy volume was calculated.They also extracted information on the surrounding landscape, such as relative soil age, and slope angle and direction.
When the landscape and creosote information were analyzed together, the researchers discovered some notable trends about how the landscape influenced plant growth.
They found that direction of the slope, or aspect, was the main control on creosote volume – with the plants growing on east-facing slopes being about five times bushier than plants on west-facing slopes.
“That’s five times more cover on the ground for the critters, for land use, or for understanding just how hot the ground is going to get – that has a huge impact,” Gearon said.
They also found that soil age influences creosote volume, with plants in the younger soil being about 27% larger than plants in the oldest.
The connection between soil age and plant size is well documented, but the influence of hillslope aspect on plant size came as a surprise, Gearon said. That’s because the research record more often relates plant growth to north and south slope directions – with few studies on east and west slopes.
Image: Geomorphic units in Nevada’s Boulder City Conservation Easement. The research found that younger units are associated with larger creosote plants. Credit: Gearon et al.
But this study suggests that growing on an eastward slope could be an important way for desert plants to stay hydrated, with the placement allowing the plants to soak up the sunshine during the cooler, wetter morning hours, unlike westward slopes which receive the most sunlight during the hottest parts of the day when they’re most susceptible to losing water via transpiration.
Erik Hamerlynk, a research ecologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said the study is significant because of the precision of the data that comes from accounting for every individual in a population.
“This is the first time I’ve seen something that takes plot level data and really expands it to a landscape scale, to a basin scale,” Hamerlynk said. “That’s just a huge accomplishment.”
He added that techniques presented in the study could help improve range management practices by offering an in-depth and standardized view of an entire plant community before and after a particular intervention.
The Clark County Desert Conservation Program funded the research.
--
Source: University of Texas at Austin
Full study: “Geomorphic controls on shrub canopy volume and spacing of creosote bush in northern Mojave Desert, USA”, Landscape Ecology.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01149-8
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I knocked out several report type items that I’ve had on my to do list for a while, some of them for several months. I should feel happy and accomplished now but for some reason I am obsessing about the remaining items on my to do list that I want to cross off. I have a few items that will take me longer than expected. My report for the program evaluation will take me until the first week of March because I want to incorporate my thesis student’s work and I have a six day vacation towards the end of February. The analysis I’m working on where I’m saying that we need to look at trauma and dissociation among people of color and not just predominately white people will take me longer to do because the R class I’m taking online does not cover the necessary basics. I’m impatient to know R already so I can work on that and several other projects. I learned more about the variables that someone wants to hire me to create too. I think I’m going to have to contact the depart of health whose data I’d be using to see if the data would actually be sufficient to create the variables. I’m hoping that I don’t have to pool across years to create the variables because doing that in R and bothering with survey weights sounds like a lot of coding trial and error. Err, onwards and upwards? I wish I felt happier about what I accomplished today.
Pew Research Center regularly makes available the full datasets that underlie most of our reports. We typically do not publish the dataset at the same time as the report. The lag time varies by study. Here’s how to access our survey data.
Here’s the raw data from my last survey !! And here’s a link to the raw data if anyone’s interested.
The survey is still open, but this has 162 responses, which is PHENOMENAL!! I’m really impressed. This data is really interesting to interpret on top of the short/long answers. I can tell a lot of you are really smart (and I can tell the english teachers in our fandom participated lol).
It’s really interesting looking at this data and the sheer amount of you who read, yet were dissatisfied with your english classes or wished there had been a greater emphasis on this or that.
Here’s a link to my OTHER fanfiction survey as well, if you could pass that around too!
P.S. The one blocked out answer I felt was really private and didn’t want to expose the person!!
My anthropological bubble was burst when I visited a village about 10 hours' walk … some five months after I had begun collecting genealogies on the Bisaasi-Teri.
(My purpose for living among the Yąnomamö was to systematically collect [data]. Since “primitive” society is organised largely by kinship relationships, much of the fundamental data was genealogical―…tracing … connections as far back in time as Yąnomamö … memory permitted … .)
I was chatting with the local headman of this [other] village and happened to casually drop the name of the wife of the Bisaasi-teri headman. A stunned silence followed, and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollable laughter, choking, gasping, and howling followed. It seems that I thought the Bisaasi-teri headman was married to a woman named “hairy c---t””. It also seems that the Bisaasi-teri headman was called “long dong” and his brother “eagle sh---”. The Bisaasi-teri headman had a son called “a---hole” and a daughter called “fart breath”.
And so on.
Blood welled up to my temples as I realised that I had nothing but nonsense to show for my five months of dedicated genealogical effort, and I had to throw away almost all the information I had collected on this—the most basic set of data I had come there to get.
Napoleon Chagnon, Yąnomamö: the fierce people
written around 1968, when he was 30 years old and two years past his PhD
For the question about where people read and post fic, basically everyone answered ao3, so for a chart picure a big circle thats the same colour all around lol.
of the respondents, roughly one third wrote fic actively:
In terms of preference for shippy versus gen content, most people consume both equally:
and in terms of sexual content, about half of respondents engage with it sometimes but only a small percentage actively seek it out.
and finally, when interactng with fic on ao3, most people leave a kudos but not a comment on most fics
