Stephen P. Ellner,the Horace White Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, is developing tools to identify factors that are most important in creating observed patterns, based on a general statistical method called Functional Analysis of Variance (fANOVA), as described in an article on the Cornell Research website. This project advances statistical methods for assessing contributions from multiple processes that affect individuals, populations, and communities.
“Patterns in nature are usually the result of many interacting processes," the article explains. "The question, why are there roughly 1,100 bird species in the United States rather than 110 or 11,000, for example, cannot be answered by listing all the contributing factors. Researchers need to know which factors are more and less important. Similarly, when ecologists study an ecosystem altered by humans, they need to determine which factors are most crucial for preserving biodiversity and which are less critical.”
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In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
