text:
Simone Dagui Ban
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Primatology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
phone: +49 341 3550 258
e-mail: simone_ban[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign <<<]eva.mpg.de
Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d'Ivoire
KM 17 route de Dabou
Abidjan - 01 B.P. 1303
Côte d'Ivoire
University Félix Houphouët Boigny
Côte d'Ivoire
Research interests
I am studying spatial cognitive capacities of free ranging adult female chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire. The goal of my research is to understand their food finding strategies. Female chimpanzees have a high memory capacity to locate fruiting trees within their territory. I study the cases of revisiting fruit trees, therefore I tracked the travel paths of the females (see Boesch, C. & Boesch-Achermann, H., 2000. The chimpanzees of the Taï Forest: behavioural ecology and evolution, Oxford University Press.) with a GPS device and recorded the females position each minute. The observed females were tracked all day long over the period of 20-50 consecutive days. Every entered fruiting tree and the revisit of it was recorded. In addition, with a botanical map of all fruit trees available for the entire territory, I want to investigate the travel paths and understand how and why females revisit fruit trees.
My research is funded by the Max Planck Society, the Leakey Foundation and the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques:


text:
Gunter divided the chain into 100 links, marked off into groups of 10 by brass rings which simplified intermediate measurement. On the face of it, the dimensions make no sense: Each link is a fraction under 8 inches long; 10 links make slightly less than 6 feet, 8 inches and a full lenghth of 66 feet. In fact, he had made a brilliant synthesis of two incompatible systems, the traditional English land measurements, based on the number 4, and the newly introduced system of decimals based on the number 10.
"Gunter's chain allowed either method to be used. An acre measured 4,840 square yards in traditional units and 10 square chains in Gunter's system. Thus, if need be, the entire process of land measurement could be computer in decimalized chains and links, and then converted to acres by dividing the results by 10."
Good illustrations can be accessed at , and .
Richard Norwood used one in his 1633-1635 traverse of London to York. (See his book A Sea-Man's Practice)
The method of surveying a field or other parcel of land was to determine corners and other significant locations, and then to measure the distance between them, taking two points at a time. The surveyor is assisted by a chainman. A ranging rod (usually a prominently coloured wooden pole) is placed in the ground at the destination point. Starting at the originating point the chain is laid out towards the ranging rod, and the surveyor then directs the chainman to make the chain perfectly straight and pointing directly at the ranging rod. Another ranging rod is put in the ground at the forward end of the chain, and the chain is moved forward so that its hind end is at that point, and the chain is extended again towards the destination point. This process is called ranging; it is repeated until the destination rod is reached, when the surveyor notes how many full lengths (chains) have been laid, and he can then directly read how many links (one-hundredth parts of the chain) are in the distance being measured.
The whole process is repeated for all the other pairs of points required, and it is a simple matter to make a scale diagram of the plot of land. The process is surprisingly accurate and requires only very low technology. A limitation is that the land must be level and continuous -- it is not physically practicable to range across large depressions or significant waterways, for example. The triangulation method requires that the land is plane (not varying significantly in slope).
The theodolite developed later enables accurate assessment of angles and surveying points over long distances became possible. The Gunter's chain was still in use for small surveys in the second half of the twentieth century. In the US, Public Lands survey plats are still published in the Chain unit to maintain the consistency of a two hundred year old database.
The chain as a unit of length of 66 feet and the link, one-hundredth of a chain, probably developed as a result of the introduction of Gunter's chain as the technique of surveying; but it is important not to confuse the two; Gunter's chain is the physical device used in the field.

subset: commoncrawl


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Hey people. I've missed you. Well, some of you.
ACC tournament coverage is at TheACC.com
ESPN3 will be live streaming all day Saturday (tourney starts at 11).
We're hosting at Carolina, in the building where I work, I'm looking forward to it, even though it meant I spent all afternoon with the label maker printing out names for the wall brackets.


text:
- Book information
- The Conquest of the Russian Arctic by Paul R. Josephson
- Published by: Harvard University Press
- Price: $55
Suburban Norilsk, one of the few cities built on permafrost (Image: Sergey Maximishin/Panos Pictures)
The Conquest of the Russian Arctic tells the tale of the country's extreme efforts to exploit the the resources in its northern reaches
AT -15 °C, high-carbon steel cracks. At -30°C, pneumatic hoses split and cranes fail. At -40 °C, compressors stop working. Ball bearings shatter. Steel structures rupture on a massive scale.
Still Russia builds, and mines, and tries to settle its Arctic territories. President Vladimir Putin has revived the old Stalinist vision that saw slave labour assembling cities on beds of permafrost. This time around, in place of the inexhaustible human resources of the gulag, there are delays, cancellations and rather nervous foreign investors.
The Arctic contains 90 per cent of Russia's recoverable hydrocarbons. Were the country to finally overcome its many and various technical challenges, after more than a century of trying, it would be vastly wealthy.
So the Arctic remains a burden Russia cannot bear to relinquish. This potentially great nation continues to saddle itself with the costs of transportation over great distances, of keeping warm, or just staying alive, in great cold.
Since the mid-1980s, Paul Josephson, a historian of science and technology, has charted the country's heroic engineering projects. He has traced its gigantomanic ambitions back, more often than not, to Stalin's Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Launched in 1948, it aimed to divert the flow of major waterways, industrialise Siberia, and turn the infertile steppe into a breadbasket.
The consequences for the environment have been at best ambiguous, at worst catastrophic. Natural resources had no price in Soviet economics. Since they were not owned privately, they had no value. Development had no regard for waste or loss. Little has changed under the current system of state capitalism; the Arctic's underfunded environmental projects are smothered under state plans for "modernisation".
Josephson is a well-travelled, well-connected and impassioned analyst. But his call for Putin's Russia "to move more slowly, to adopt measured policies... forego impatience for circumspection" is unlikely to be heeded.
After 40 years writing sober, academic accounts of the world's most hubristic, atrocity-littered engineering projects, it may be time for Josephson to bare his teeth a little.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Arctic nightmares"
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