User:Wesley R. Elsberry

Summary
My name is Wesley R. Elsberry. I'm currently a data scientist with RealPage, Inc. of Richardson, Texas. Previously, I've been a Scientific/Engineering Programmer with the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida and a Visiting Research Associate at Michigan State University, working with Rob Pennock on the evolution of intelligent behavior. I was formerly the Information Project Manager at the National Center for Science Education. I have a Ph.D. in wildlife and fisheries sciences from Texas A&M University, and my research focus for my dissertation was sound production in bottlenose dolphins.

I'm also the current president of the TalkOrigins Archive Foundation.

Web Pages

 * TalkOrigins Archive Foundation
 * Antievolution.org: The Critic's Resource
 * The Panda's Thumb Weblog
 * The Austringer, my personal weblog
 * OnlineZoologists
 * Baywing.net
 * Bwng.us (short domain name similar to "Baywing")

Former Article
I requested deletion of my Wikipedia article on 2006/12/09. In anticipation of it going away, I've copied the information here.

Dr. Wesley Royce Elsberry (born January 23, 1960) is a marine biologist with an interdisciplinary background in zoology, computer science, and wildife and fisheries sciences. He has become involved in the creation-evolution controversy.

Biography
Elsberry was born in Lakeland, Florida. He was brought up in the Evangelical United Brethren church, which merged with the Methodists in 1968 to form the United Methodist Church. He attended a public elementary school, an evangelical junior high, and a Catholic high school. He worked on a survey crew for a paving contractor during summers in high school and part of college. He received a National Merit Scholarship and earned a B.S. in zoology from the University of Florida in 1982. During that period, he worked as a staff photographer for the Independent Florida Alligator newspaper.

After graduating, he worked for Media Image Photography in Gainesville, Florida. In 1983, he became a lab technologist for the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Florida. In 1984, he married Diane J. Blackwood. In 1985, he became a biologist in the Department of Physiological Sciences of the College of Veterinary Medicine there, working with Professor Richard H. Lambertsen on the histology, physiology, and epidemiology of fin whales.

He then entered a program in artificial intelligence, obtaining an M.S.C.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1989. Following graduation, he was employed by General Dynamics Data Systems Division, programming fire-control computers for F-16 fighters. In 1991, he became a research scientist at the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, working on a mapping system for the U.S. Air Force.

In 1993, he began his doctoral studies in wildlife and fisheries sciences at Texas A&M University with Professor William E. Evans as his major advisor. He collaborated with the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program in 1995 to investigate marine mammal hearing at depth. He periodically travelled to San Diego to continue collaboration on temporary threshold shift in marine mammals, until he was employed as a Behavioral Research Programmer for Science Applications International Corporation. He collaborated with Ted W. Cranford on a study of dolphin biosonar sound production in 1999. In 2001, he was awarded the Society for Marine Mammalogy's Fred Fairfield Award for Innovation in Marine Mammal Research. He completed his Ph.D. in 2003.

In 2003, he joined the National Center for Science Education as its Information Project Director.

Evolution/Creation Issues
In 1986, Elsberry attended a lecture by a young-earth creationist geologist. Following that, he took up criticizing antievolution claims in letters to the editor of newspapers and in online fora. His stance in these matters has been one of theistic evolution, with the concern that science be taught in science classes, and non-science be taught elsewhere. He participated in Fidonet echoes, particularly the Science Echo, from 1988 to 1994. In 1989, he began operating his own BBS, first as an RBBS-Net node and later as a Fidonet node. He started the Neural-Net Echo in 1989, and the Evolution Echo in 1991. He became a participant in the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup in 1991. By 1995, he had contributed a FAQ on punctuated equilibria to the TalkOrigins Archive, as well as the Jargon and Biographica compilations. He also created his own set of web pages dealing with scientific creationism in 1995.

In 1997, he presented at the "Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise" conference held by intelligent design advocates in Austin, Texas, giving a defense of methodological naturalism. He also assisted the National Center for Science Education that year with regard to the review of science textbooks undertaken by the state of Texas.

In 2001, he presented opposite William A. Dembski at the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences/American Association for the Advancement of Science "Interpreting Evolution" conference at Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Brett Vickers turned over care and maintenance of the TalkOrigins Archive to him late in 2001. He established a group of about a dozen volunteers, the TalkOrigins Archive Delegation, to handle needed maintenance and updates of the site. He also established the Antievolution.org site in 2001 as a place to collect critical information on the antievolution movement. In 2002, he presented at the "Evolution and Intelligent Design" session of the CSICOP 4th World Skeptics conference in Burbank, California, along with Massimo Pigliucci, Kenneth Miller, Paul Nelson, and William A. Dembski.

In 2003, he was given a "Friend of Darwin" award by the National Center for Science Education, along with Robert Pennock and Patricia Princehouse. Later in the year, he took the position of Information Project Director at NCSE.

In 2004, he helped establish the Panda's Thumb weblog. While hospitalized following emergency surgery resulting from chronic ulcerative colitis, he established his personal weblog, The Austringer.

Projects
Things that are in some sense in progress.

On FineArtAmerica
Photographs by Wesley R. Elsberry

I have started putting various of my photographs that I think may be appreciated by others on the FineArtAmerica site.

MemorySharing
Github MemorySharing repository

Tooling in Python to process process digital images for photo frames and online galleries. Relies on free open source projects.

Each of the tools I have placed in this repository is here in order to advance a basic set of goals I have set for my my approach.

* Workflow efficiency * Throughput * Archival considerations * Aid to organization

I am actively working through my processes, though I consider myself to be at the beginning of this journey. I am putting my work in this repository in the hopes that others may find some benefit in either my discussion or use of my code. Because I am building several of my tools using the PySimpleGui package, I am using the LGL license for materials in this repository.

MatPopDyn
Github MatPopDyn repository

Matrix-based Population Dynamics (Leslie and Lefkovitch approaches)

Code to generically handle population dynamics using either Leslie age-matrix or Lefkovitch age-stage matrix approaches.

Originally released in my blog post, "Population Modeling in Python", 2012/10/08 Population Modeling in Python (on The Austringer)

matpopdyn.py : Original coding for Python 2, scraped from blog post, had character transliteration issues. Fixed character transliteration and encoding issues for clean execution in Python 2.7. Also tested for execution in Python 3.7.

Text from the blog post:

A long-time standard method in population modeling is the Leslie matrix. This technique applies when one has data about the age structure of a population and produces estimates going forward by using matrix multiplication to go from the population numbers, fecundity, and survivorship numbers to get the estimate of the population in each age class at the next time step.

A similar method is the Lefkovitch approach. This is still based upon matrix operations, but the underlying data involves stages rather than age structure. This sort of model is often used to capture more complex life histories than are tracked in a Leslie matrix model.

The similarities make it straightforward to incorporate both approaches into one supporting Python class.

The Python module defines the LMatrix class. The dependencies are the Numpy module and the interval module. I used “pip install interval” to get the interval module on my machine. If you run this module in standalone mode, it runs a test of the LMatrix model with a web-accessible example of a Leslie matrix and of a Lefkovitch matrix.

ERISWeb
Github ERISWeb repository

ERIS Web: Event Recorder Information System for the Web

This is a Javascript object definition for an event recorder to run in web browser or under Node.js.

The ultimate specification for functionality is the ERIS 1.07 MS-DOS event recorder application. (See ERIS 1.07 webpage) Obviously, things are different in Javascript and browsers than they were in MS-DOS.

What is event recording?

Event recording is the logging of events by an observer, in a fashion that allows for analysis of temporal sequences found in the event stream. Event recording is accomplished through the use of an event recorder system, which accepts user input and logs it in some permanent or semi- permanent fashion. While event recording can be used for interval sampling, the area in which it excels is in continuous recording of behavior, especially for focal animal follows.

Event Recording: Determining Suitability of the Technique

Advantages Over Checksheets:

* No transcription errors in going to computer analysis * Ease of archiving exact copies of data * Consistent association of timestamp * Faster data entry for tokens * Allows for easier continuous recording * Touch-typists need not divide attention between animal and recorder

Disadvantages Compared to Checksheets:

* More ways that hardware and software can fail * Data at risk until archived * Hazardous environments still favor checksheet use

Status of ERIS Web:

2016/07/17: Initial version, essentially a try-out of Javascript and the browser as an event recording system. Provides "accept", "delete" classes for tokens. Minimal HTML page interface. Does not yet implement several of the features noted in the ERIS 1.07 "lessons learned" list.

AED-Docker
Github AED-Docker repository

Avida-ED is a substantially large software project, and one of the issues with continued use of a static software package as a web app is that the rest of the components may have changes in their composition: user browsers update, underlying libraries change interfaces, etc.

In order to provide a means of running Avida-ED as a web app through at least the medium term (say, ten years or so), we are providing this project to encapsulate Avida-ED into a Docker container project. By doing so, we hope to preclude breakage due to ordinary causes like encountering an incompatible browser update. Because Docker is popular and programs running in Docker containers should continue to work as long as backward-compatility continues.

The downside is that Docker containers are more complex to manage than native executables.