As I mentioned in my "Life Updates" blog post, I spent last week in New Orleans, Louisiana for the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPAs). This was my second AAPA conference; my first was last year in Atlanta, Georgia where I gave a talk about a Neandertal genomics study. Four days of hanging out with friends and chatting about science = AWESOME! | |
As you can see from this snippet of the meeting schedule, I was a participant in a rather unique invited session. I've previously mentioned UpGoer Five, and Daniel was kind enough to write up a description of his research following the same rules I did: only utilize the top 1000 most commonly used English words. This was the inaugural UpGoer Five AAPA session, and it was a major success thanks to the coordinators, Kim and Katherine. We were allowed five minutes to talk about our research, and could use whatever words we wanted on our slides while reading our ridiculous scripts. The entire session was filled with laughs, applause, and the strangest allusions that still somehow made sense. And I mean literally filled: it was standing room only in there! Dad and sis came too :) |
I've included my dialogue and slides below for your reading pleasure - I strongly suggest you read it out loud, it's more fun that way :) I presented on my past few months of work analyzing the morphological measurements that I took when I was in Madagascar. I even brought props (see below). PJ and I thought it would be really nifty if I 3D printed the scan data that I collected so that people could actually see and touch these incredibly rare sifaka bones. I knew absolutely nothing about 3D printing until I discovered 3D Hubs.
I've been likening 3D Hubs to a sort of Etsy service for people interested in having something 3D printed. Once you make a profile, you can upload your 3D meshes (either .obj or .stl files) to the website and get immediate estimates for how much the jobs would cost in the variety of materials available. I thought a high detail resin would work best for duplicating the intricate structures of the bones, and was lucky enough to find Daniel Steele's Hub in my estimates. | |
Daniel was kind enough to explain every step of the process to me, answer every single silly question I asked, and even print in multiple colors, all at what I think was an extremely reasonable price. His enthusiasm for making prints precisely how I wanted them made me feel a bit less crazy for wanting 3D printed sifaka bones haha. The prints came out better than I expected, and were extremely well received by our collaborators and colleagues at AAPA. I even mentioned them during my UpGoer talk: "...had some of these computer matches made into matter and brought them with me today...". Check out the rest of the talk below in green, along with a video of the entire symposium (once it's been uploaded by the UpGoer organizers). And please check out 3D Hubs to learn more about 3D printing, as well as Daniel's page on there - he's printed some pretty neat things :) Enjoy!
(1) Hi, I'm me, and I work with this person, and I will be talking about this today. (2) Humans have been around for at least ten hundred hundred years, which is not a very long time when you consider the age of our world. Yet in this small bit of time, humans have become very good at changing the world and the not-human lives around them in all kinds of ways. Sure, humans meant to change some of the animals and green growing things to have more food around, but we are only just realizing how many other animals and green growing things have changed too. | Click on the arrows to advance the slides. Bold text were points in my speech where I gestured to the slides :) |
(3) One of the things that humans have gotten especially good at is catching and eating animals.
| (4) Most animals with pointed teeth look for animals to eat that are young, old, or sick because they are easier to catch and eat. (5) Humans are different - humans often like to catch and eat the biggest animals because a bigger animal means more food all at once, so more people get to eat at the same time. |
(6) People who study life have noticed that as humans catch and eat the larger-bodied animals, sometimes only the smaller ones are left to make babies and over time all the animal bodies get smaller.
(7) These are some of the animals and green growing things that have been getting smaller over time because of humans catching and eating them.
(7) These are some of the animals and green growing things that have been getting smaller over time because of humans catching and eating them.
(8) We can tell how big the bodies of some animals used to be by looking at the long, hard white things that hold their bodies together, especially by looking at the ends of the ones in their arms and legs. (9) I wanted to find out if this getting smaller thing might be happening in the jumping tree animals that live in the number four-biggest land-surrounded-by-water. | |
(10) Humans have been eating the jumping tree animals here for at least twenty hundred years.
(11) We think that might be part of the reason why there are not any really huge animals living here anymore.
(11) We think that might be part of the reason why there are not any really huge animals living here anymore.
| (12) I went to this area to see if the long, hard white arm and leg things from animals that lived a long time ago are bigger than the ones from today from the same place. (13) While there are big and small grown ups in the living group of jumping tree animals, boy jumping tree animals are not bigger than girl animals, so we can look at the long, hard white things from all the grown ups. |
(14) I brought this picture-taking thing with me to take hundreds of pictures of each of the hard white things that were found on the ground after the animals died. (15) I took all of these pictures, cleaned them up, and fixed them all together on the computer to exactly build a match of the whole hard, white thing that I could take numbers from. I had some of these computer matches made into matter and brought them with me today if you would like to check them out later. | |
(16) This picture on the left is showing you one of the sets of the numbers I took from the long, hard white things in the legs of the animals from today in not-blue and the ones that lived hundreds of years ago in blue. On the right, these numbers were all joined so that we could see if the animals from a long time ago were bigger than the ones who are living today. From these numbers, it seems like the jumping tree animals from a long time ago were maybe a bit bigger than the ones that live in this area today. Maybe this means that humans might have been trying to catch and eat the biggest animals in the groups, but we are not yet sure.
(17) Thank you for your time, and I also want to thank all of the people and groups shown here for all of their help.