PeckVis: A Visual Analytics Tool to Analyze Dominance Hierarchies in Small Groups

An analytical tool to support public policies and isolation barriers against SARS-CoV-2 based on mobility patterns and socio-economic aspects

It is crucial to develop spatiotemporal analysis tools to mitigate risks during a pandemic. Many dashboards encountered in the literature do not consider how the geolocation characteristics and travel patterns may influence the spread of the virus. This work brings an interactive tool that is capable of crossing information about mobility patterns, geolocation characteristics and epidemiologic variables. To do so, our system uses a mobility network, generated through anonymized mobile location data, which enables the division of a region into representative clusters. The clusters' aggregated socioeconomic, and epidemiologic indicators can be analyzed through multiple coordinated views. The proposal is to enable users to understand how different locations commute citizens, monitor risk over time, and understand what locations need more assistance, considering different layers of visualization, such as clusters and individual locations. The main novelty is the interactive way to construct the mobility network that defines the social distancing level and the way that risks are managed, since many different geolocation characteristics can be considered and visualized, such as socioeconomic indicators of a location, the economic importance of a set of locations, and the connection of important neighborhoods of a city with other cities. The proposed tool was built and verified by experts assembled to give scientific recommendations to the city administration of Recife, the capital city of Pernambuco. Our analysis shows how a policymaker could use the tool to evaluate different isolation scenarios considering the trade-off between economic activity and contamination risk, where the practical insights can also be used to tighten and relax mitigation measures in other phases of a pandemic.

The Island of Female Power? Intersexual Dominance Relationships in the Lemurs of Madagascar

The extant primates of Madagascar (Lemuriformes) represent the endpoints of an adaptive radiation following a single colonization event more than 50 million years ago. They have since evolved a diversity of life history traits, ecological adaptations and social systems that rivals that of all other living primates combined. Their social systems are characterized by a unique combination of traits, including the ability of adult females to dominate adult males. In fact, there is no other group of mammals in which female dominance is so widespread. Yet, recent research has indicated that there is more interspecific variation in lemur intersexual relationships than previously acknowledged. Here, we therefore review and summarize the relevant literature, quantifying the extent of sex-bias in intersexual dominance relations documented in observational and experimental studies in captivity and the wild. Female dominance is often, but not always, implemented by spontaneous male submission in the absence of female aggression and linked to female sexual maturation. We connect the available evidence to the hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the evolution of female dominance among lemurs. The occurrence of female dominance in all lemur families and the interspecific variation in its extent indicate that it has evolved soon after lemurs colonized Madagascar – presumably in response to particular ecological challenges – and that it has since been reduced in magnitude independently in some taxa. Our study contributes important comparative information on sex roles from an independent primate radiation and provides general insights into the conditions, opportunities and obstacles in the evolution of female-biased power.

A Critical Reflection on Visualization Research: Where Do Decision Making Tasks Hide?

It has been widely suggested that a key goal of visualization systems is to assist decision making, but is this true? We conduct a critical investigation on whether the activity of decision making is indeed central to the visualization domain. By approaching decision making as a user task, we explore the degree to which decision tasks are evident in visualization research and user studies. Our analysis suggests that decision tasks are not commonly found in current visualization task taxonomies and that the visualization field has yet to leverage guidance from decision theory domains on how to study such tasks. We further found that the majority of visualizations addressing decision making were not evaluated based on their ability to assist decision tasks. Finally, to help expand the impact of visual analytics in organizational as well as casual decision making activities, we initiate a research agenda on how decision making assistance could be elevated throughout visualization research.