A
half-day afternoon workshop to be held on Sunday 11th December 2005
at the
16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals in San
Diego
The details for the conference are as follows:
Registration fee until November 15
(postmarked): $45 US
Registration
and cancellation deadline: November 25, 2005
Cancellations
will be refunded by cheque only
There is the possibility that those who are registered for the workshop who
have their own data sets may be able to arrange a brief meeting with Hal during
his free time while he’s at the conference to discuss their concerns and go
over their own analyses. Please email Tonya (twimmer@dal.ca)
if you would be interested in a separate meeting with Hal. The length of time
for these meetings will depend on the number of people who are interested. We
will update those who register on this if we can arrange the time in Hal’s
schedule.
SOCPROG is a series
of MATLAB programs written by Hal Whitehead for analyzing data on the social
structure, population structure and movements of identified individuals. The
programs are designed to be easy to use, most input is done through graphical
user interfaces (i.e. windows with things to click on), and most things can be
done without any knowledge of MATLAB (although this helps for custom options,
figuring out errors, making your own extensions, etc.). There is also a
compiled version of SOCPROG, so you don’t need access to MATLAB (although you
have more options if you do). The programs are also designed to be pretty
flexible so you can tailor the analyses to your data and hypotheses. The
program is free and can be downloaded from: http://myweb.dal.ca/~hwhitehe/social.htm.
There is also more information about SOCPROG at this site, including the
manual.
The computer
program SOCPROG is used by marine mammalogists, and others, to examine social
structure, usually using data from photo-identifications. However, analyzing
social structure and using SOCPROG are not straightforward. The SOCPROG
workshop on December 11th plans to provide guidance in these
matters, using onscreen real-time analyses of real data. Participants do not
need to have experience in using SOCPROG (although this will help).
Possible workshop issues:
What is Social Structure?
Observing Interactions and
Associations: Collecting Data
Organizing Data
Describing Relationships: Methods Available
Building Models of Social Structure: Methods Available
Comparing Social Structures: How Can we do this?
New Approaches
SOCPROG: what it does
SOCPROG: how to get and install it
SOCPROG: inputting data
SOCPROG: restricting data; setting
sampling associations and sampling periods
SOCPROG: displays of associations
SOCPROG: tests of social hypotheses
SOCPROG: temporal changes in social
structure
SOCPROG: multivariate methods, and
incorporation of genetic data
SOCPROG: movement and population
analyses
Other computer programs
Chair:
Hal Whitehead
Organizer:
Tonya Wimmer
Back to the conference
website
Back to the Whitehead Lab home page