Mackay Minutes 2016/09/22

MacKay website, and minutes

How did we do on our todo list?

• All:
  • Read The Climate of Nova Scotia

• Andy:
  • Continue with TSVD analysis
    • Anything weird about regions 1 or 2, year 22? It popped up as an unexpected rank-one tensor in the TSVD
    • Check out March and #2 in MonthTempsParrsboro-n-TSVDyears.png
      • Parrsboro....
    • Related, I gave Laura a quiz
  • Prepare and submit abstract for MAA talk
  • Get vector components to Laura for regression analysis
  • NatureWatch Plantwatch data, modern
    • NatureWatch-PlantwatchDataNS.xls

• Madison:
  • Keep working the GIS component
  • Take care of checking data for errors
  • Look for errors in 1915

• Laura:
  • Perform regressions on TSVD vectors
  • Get early spring averages and try a regression on the yearly component

• Steve:
  • will look into how to animate the FAT and the model predictions in R

The Readings

• The Climate of Nova Scotia (from The Climate of Canada).
• REFLECTIONS ON TIME AND PLACE: THE NOVA SCOTIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE IN ITS FIRST 150 YEARS: SUZANNE ZELLER -- great perspectives on MacKay and phenology
• Phyto-Phenology in its Application to the Plants of the Philadelphia Neighborhood -- describes the value of the MacKay project -- starting p. 313, but mentioned earlier as well. Also scientific results about meteorological variables and their impact upon plant growth.
• BOTANICAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES: Climate Change Effects on Arctic Plant species
• Arctic Sea Ice Back to 1850: has a picture of Newfoundland ice that may be relevant....

Moving forward

• Poster Session Deadline approaches in October...
• Talk for the MAA:

Pioneering Climate Science and Data Analysis: the work of Alexander MacKay (1848-1929)

in the category of

Interdisciplinary Topics in Mathematics (Statistics, linear algebra, GIS, Botany, climate science)

in the contributed papers section.

Our objective would be to

1. Describe MacKay as a brilliant quantitative scientist, and his citizen science project (Andy)
2. Describe the summary data, and how we found it; associated data (e.g. climatological data); and problems we encountered, how we solved them, etc. (Madison)
3. Describe climate-related discoveries so far (Laura).

http://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2017/2180_maacall

Todo for next week

• All:

• Andy:
  • Continue with TSVD analysis
    • Put the preliminaries in our report
  • Redo analyses generally, once I have the final data set. Need to
    • Impute some values, possibly
    • Redo the tensor decomposition
    • Laura will need to redo the regressions
  • Get snow and ice records from Brian Hill
  • Summarize relevant background readings, and add to the report.

• Madison:
  • Finalize the data set with Laura
  • Make some choropleth maps of Nova Scotia
  • Add the regression line from Laura to the map of Nova Scotia.

• Laura:
  • Finalize the data set with Laura
  • Get the equation of the regression line for Madison. Maybe just give some coordinates, and Madison can add a line segment along both axes, centered on Nova Scotia

• Steve:
  • Will work on doing the animated maps of the data, using shapefiles supplied by Madison

Next meeting

Skipping a week, due to L&M's activities.... Next meeting, Thursday, 10/06, 3:00