R.O.C. On!

So, so much data.

One of the best, and worst, things about conservation acoustics is how easy and affordable it is to collect sound data. For the costs of paying one observer to sit in the field watching for animals, you could buy three or four acoustic recorders that can be used year after year. For any penny-pinching manager this is particularly enticing.

Unfortunately, while it is becoming ever easier to collect "gobs" of data it is also becoming more difficult to process it. For example, my PhD project will involve data collected  from 43 sensors every summer for four years. I estimate the total storage requirements to be over 40TB of acoustic data. To put that in perspective, the chemistry department in St Andrews was just gifted a server of the same size-for the entire department.

Anyway, as sometimes happens, thousands of dollars worth of recording equipment are purchased and deployed and one or two people are hired to process the data.

Admin1: Researchers are expensive but acoustics recorders are cheap.
Admin2: Then let's buy lots of recorders and hire one poor sop to process all the data.

Why Are Scientists So Obsessed With the Peer Review?

I recently got into an argument about the safety of the measles vaccine.

I’m quite fond of the person I was debating with so I tried to gently persuade them that the benefits of most vaccines outweigh the risks. I was also curious as to where they were getting their information from, particularly the so called studies that link autism to childhood vaccinations. I was happy that they were able to produce the reports but my heart sank when I realized the document she sent me was a work of pseudo-science.

Bats Blast Blocking Beams to Prevent Other Bats from Biting Bugs

First, alliteration win.

Second, bats are awesome. They are the acoustic equivalent of flying dolphins. In terms of bad-ass acoustic ecology (because that's a thing), they are definitely at the top of the heap. As I'm sure most of you know, bats use echolocation to find their prey. They emit short chirps that bounce off solid objects and come back to their ears. Using the time difference between when they produced the chirp and when they hear the echo, bats are able to tell how far away their food is.