Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The Sight Of Road Kill Makes A Pretty, Data-Rich Picture | Synopsis

The Sight Of Road Kill Makes A Pretty, Data-Rich Picture

White pen ...
White pen ... by Claudio Gennari ..."Cogli l'attimo ferma il tempo"
License (according to Flickr): Attribution License
Excerpt:

Wildlife ecologist Danielle Garneau is making a habit of tracking down road kill. She actually seeks it out, hunting for clues about larger ecological trends. Garneau records it all on a free smartphone app, EpiCollect. Standing by the side of the road in upstate New York, phone in hand, Garneau peers down at a dead, bloody and smelly skunk. She takes a picture of the carcass and opens EpiCollect to input data, including: location, time of day, the road's speed limit, whether the carcass has been scavenged. The data gets sent to the project server, and the road kill appears as a red pushpin on a digital map. Road kill may not be glamorous, but Garneau, who works at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, says these dead critters carry valuable information.

People:

Danielle Garneau

Overall Sentiment: -0.238549

Relevance: 0.929319

SentimentQuote
0"We're looking at a fine scale at patterns of animal movement — maybe we can pick up migratory patterns, maybe we can see a phrenology change," she says. ...
-0.0298523"We're looking at a fine scale at patterns of animal movement — maybe we can pick up migratory patterns, maybe we can see a phrenology change," she says. "And also, in the long term, if many of these animals are threatened or they're in a decline, the hope would be that we could share this information with people who could make changes."
-0.405368"We're embedded in their world, and they're embedded in our world, and the boundaries are kinda blurry," Garneau says. ...
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 3
  • Aggregate Sentiment: -0.4352203
  • Mean: -0.14507343333333
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Key:

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  • The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
  • The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

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