TITLE OF SESSION: Studying African Lions in the Serengeti Ecosystem with Python NUMBER OF SESSION: Thursday 11am PRESENTED BY: Michael Urban, Lion Research Center CONFERENCE: PyCon 2005 DATE: March 24 2005 LOCATION: GWU Cafritz Grand Ballroom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REAL-TIME NOTES: {If you've contributed, add your name, e-mail & URL at the bottom} INTRODUCTION Identifying lions - Whiskers, ear notches, eyes - "Pride" -- tribe of lions? Identification Problems - Time consuming - Nomadic males are hard Information sharing difficult - gathered on index cards, manually xported from africa Identification probs - pride ranges overlap - individuals can be nomadic Radio collars - which lion in any pride collared - need to know which need new batteries (apparently, not included) Project Goals - Get rid of mundane tasks for researchers Why Python? - Didn't want unsupported stuff (old VB) - Wanted to finish quickly -- no C++ - Cross Platform, so no .NET - Meant Python or Java Java work - It was slow - Lots of lines - Older machines, JRL slow Solving the ID problem - Identification problems are similar to DNA sequence matching - Similar markings are probably a match Data Unification - Using mxODBC Demographic data on lions -- cubs of female, where she's been, who she's been with Data sharing was hard when it was done with index cards Results - Id. much faster and much more accurate - Duplicate entries have been reduced - Comlex data mining can be performed in seconds rather than hours - Data can be shared quickly and easily between researchers and labs Philosophical Reasons for choosing Python - People since the earliest art have loved and respected lions - Not endangered, but threatened - Open Source important because we need all our money in the feild We owe a huge debt to the Open Source community Your work has gone to helping save lions *** pause *** Q&A Q: How many lions are in your database? A: About 300 in the Serengeti, also working on other databases About 30 years of data -- most of it unanalyzed Would be nice to look at older data for long term trends Q: Have you considered making your data public? A: Tough to do because field is competetitive and people have been known to steal data -- don't want to hurt current PhD candidates ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below} http://www.lionresearch.org/main.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- QUOTES: {collect nice quotes from this session's speaker} ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTRIBUTORS: {add your name, e-mail address and URL below} Linden Wright Jonathan Blocksom Bob Kuehne ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-MAIL BOUNCEBACK: {add your e-mail address separated by commas for easy mailing of this text} ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ON / KEY TO THIS TEMPLATE: HEADLINES ... have to be CAPITALISED and stand alone in a line to be recognized This differentiates from the text that follows A _variable_ that you can change will be surrounded by _underscores_ Spaces in variables are also replaced with _under_scores_ This allows people to select the whole _variable_ with a simple double-click A {tool-tip} is lower case and surrounded by {curly brackets / parentheses} These supply helpful contextual information. References should be added as [1] [2] and so forth. An *emphasis* can be put on a word by adding *stars* around it ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: Copyright shared between all the participants unless otherwise stated... Generic conference template copyright by Tom Coates, tom@plasticbag.org Additions and Conference.mode by Dominik Wagner, dom@codingmonkeys.de