Saturday, November 28, 2009

Sometimes long weekends... are really long

Happy late Thanksgiving, all. Hope everyone had a good and safe holiday (the first time I typed that, I wrote "food" rather than "good"... tell you anything about my Thursday?). I didn't get to see my family this year, because I couldn't take the time after being sick last month. Not that I've gotten much schoolwork done, but my apartment is clean, my labmate's cat is fed, and I'm so bored I'll probably be productive tomorrow. Slightly less than 3 weeks until I get to take data on the plane and work from the relatively stress free environment in my parents' house. I. Can't. Wait.

Science-wise: At the conference last month, there were a couple of talks about using passive acoustic monitoring to estimate population densities of marine mammals, especially off the northern coast of Alaska, where it's often very difficult to visually observe whales/walruses/ etc. This article summarizes an attempt to use computer algorithms to do the same thing from bird song, with associated applications to marine mammals. The summary isn't very detailed, and I'll need to read the paper before I can really agree with whether or not it will be useful in my field, but it seems promising.

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