So in vegas there are these things called "slot machines". You put quarters in and get big money back. They are regulated. Its very hard to tamper with them. You'd think that voting by machine, which some might say is slightly more important, might be at least as equally highly regulated. This of course doesn't mean that its a good idea or that there still wouldn't be problems, just to say there are systems where machines (mostly those that track money) do a pretty good job.
I did listen to it again and I while I agree with you I think my point holds. He really skirts the problem. The line that bugged me (paraphrased) "its (content) is trending way up... one problem - 2x the content = 2x effort, but *value to player is not 2x as much*, we're fighting a losing battle here". So yes, we can partially solve the problem by ignoring this problem and "scale the possibility space" but really more *content, by it self, is not addressing the issue, its passing the buck to the user. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, its just not a solution to guaranteeing the next great game.
If you watched the Spore intro at the (developers?) conference (check for google video) you'll notice the lead programmer mention the problem with content, how much it costs, how much people demand etc. etc. He goes on to say that content is not the solution to making a game good. Fast-forward to the end of the talk- all he can talk about is content, how the game will be incredible because of all the user content, content stored in small procedures, content shared instantly, etc. etc. I thought he said content wasn't the answer? Found that odd.
I'd predict that the 12th time you fly off and nuke/capture/(insert ability from ladder here) another planet of mutant chickens/care bears/t-rexes that someone else created, that the game gets old- fast.
How about making the *rules or mechanics of the game* procedural, and creatable/modifiable by the user?
Dr. Fisher is an awesome collector- he has taken many new ant species (and passed on many other undescribed species to other experts in the field). Systematist like him will likely name tens or hundreds of species in their lifetimes, coming up with names for all of them is just a little icing on the cake- but it can get boring too. Fisher's website is one of the better "biodiversity" sites out there in terms of "web-tech". Perhaps his ulterior motive- associating his work in any way possible with a giant like google can only help his work in the long run, particularly in biodiversity/systematics studies which are notoriously underfunded...hint hint.
Whoa. Your obviously a bit of a GenBank newb. There are papers where whole *organisms* were missequenced and identified incorrectly then submitted to Genbank under misidentifications. And not just minor problems, but across phyla (fungi identified as insects for example). Just because Genbank aligns your data and suggests there might be errors has absolutely nothing to do what you call it or how it gets submitted. We have several projects we are working on 20 percent or more of sequences we retrieved from genbank are not the gene that they say they are, who knows if the are what they claim to be identified as (data only as good as the person doing the identification of course). Genbank doesn't even have a tiny fraction of scientific names in its taxonomy database- how can it be solid reference? Are there error checking measures? Yes. Are there sequences retracted daily from genbank from errors? Yes.
Possibly, but not necessarily so. There is no "species" defining gene of course. And the dream of one (such as COI) that will provide all answers, is just that, a dream. A barcode is a unique identifier for an *already identified object*. If you don't know what your species are in the first place, you can't give it a barcode. Genetic differences can alert one that there might be a new species there, but they can't recognize the presence of a new species without supporting evidence. Most upper year evolution classes will point out there are 10s if not 100s of species definitions. Suggesting that there is only one, based on data from 1 or a few genes, is absurd, and clearly not scientific. This project is a major buyer-beware. It is steeped in politics (funding of course), and some would argue not science. Many of the methods proposed in it have not been rigourously tested in peer-reviewed science.
That said, it is exiciting that initiatives like this are drawing attention to the importance of biodiversity, and good results will come from this and related projects. Just don't assume its the be-all and end all!
1) Genbank taxonomy is notoriously horrid, as any practicing systematist knows. 2_ Anyone can submit any sequence to genbank and call it what they want, without any measure of quality control. Of course the errors can be caught, and annotated, but this is not the type of system you want for barcoding.
I've been to several debates regarding this technology. In fact, the "kicker" slide used in these talks is a mocked-up little tri-corder like gadget which you insert your leg/organism/leaf etch into. The tri-coder sequences the bit rapidly, and spits out the pertinent data. Of course this is just a vision of the future, but its funny that they make no qualms about presenting the potential tool as a tri-corder or star-trek like gadget.
Gestures seemed like a gimik, but man, now I'm hooked, not hard to believe that they will revolutionize the way we browse down the road, obviously in conjunction with broswers like Moz/FF. They are particularly useful when you need to do many reloads while building web pages and when flipping through tabs. Try them, give them a chance. Navigation from wherever you are without moving the pointer to a button (yes kbd can do this too) is fabulous. The degree of customization is awesome too.
Fairly widely acknowledged in the real world (tm) that the worst jobs are roofing (+/-40c + tar + slant) and road paving crews (heat+more tar+idiot drivers). Mindless repetition and fumes are bad for the brain.
Would have thought astronomers would have had a naming convention already, its a pretty "old" science. Perhaps they will adopt something like that used in biological sciences, wherein there are a number of different "codes" [1][2] [3] by which organisms are named. These codes are currently being challenged by a new system that has many up in arms...
what you don't hear is that on that tree you can bet that there were literaly hundreds of insect, fungi, and bacteria species that had host-specific relationships to that tree...hundreds for the price of one
A&M researchers, while dissapointed with their non-cloned cat, happily pointed out that it can be used in their revamped cold-fusion machine which generates ulimited energy from fur.
The alternative, which academic science really doesn't like, is to not cite the papers you read. See Wolfram's latest where he clearly reads much but cites *nothing*. Perhaps that's really what he means by a "new kind of science."
Not to be a naysayer...but I will anyways. What happens in 30 years when a massive electromagnetic field wipes out all digital machines (possibly in conjuction with some attempt by humans to wipe out the robots taking over the world...those damn robots!)? By then 15 years of scientific publication may be more or less completely digital, and all gone, gone. Better hope we never lose access to that handy-dandy resource electricity....
Don't know what kind of tools are available to editors but...but why don't slashdot editors encorperate a bayesian duplicate submission detector in their "editing" process. Perhaps it would help them from spamming their own site?!?!?
Slashdot Mirror
This is biology we're talking about, "all" almost never holds. Most insect diversity then (like now) was probably under 1cm in size.
Believe what you like, but some trivial homework will show you Zootaxa is a very real journal (it's the leading publisher of new taxa in the world).
... so much for mindless dragging, dropping and running.
So in vegas there are these things called "slot machines". You put quarters in and get big money back. They are regulated. Its very hard to tamper with them. You'd think that voting by machine, which some might say is slightly more important, might be at least as equally highly regulated. This of course doesn't mean that its a good idea or that there still wouldn't be problems, just to say there are systems where machines (mostly those that track money) do a pretty good job.
I did listen to it again and I while I agree with you I think my point holds. He really skirts the problem. The line that bugged me (paraphrased) "its (content) is trending way up... one problem - 2x the content = 2x effort, but *value to player is not 2x as much*, we're fighting a losing battle here". So yes, we can partially solve the problem by ignoring this problem and "scale the possibility space" but really more *content, by it self, is not addressing the issue, its passing the buck to the user. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, its just not a solution to guaranteeing the next great game.
If you watched the Spore intro at the (developers?) conference (check for google video) you'll notice the lead programmer mention the problem with content, how much it costs, how much people demand etc. etc. He goes on to say that content is not the solution to making a game good. Fast-forward to the end of the talk- all he can talk about is content, how the game will be incredible because of all the user content, content stored in small procedures, content shared instantly, etc. etc. I thought he said content wasn't the answer? Found that odd.
I'd predict that the 12th time you fly off and nuke/capture/(insert ability from ladder here) another planet of mutant chickens/care bears/t-rexes that someone else created, that the game gets old- fast.
How about making the *rules or mechanics of the game* procedural, and creatable/modifiable by the user?
Dr. Fisher is an awesome collector- he has taken many new ant species (and passed on many other undescribed species to other experts in the field). Systematist like him will likely name tens or hundreds of species in their lifetimes, coming up with names for all of them is just a little icing on the cake- but it can get boring too. Fisher's website is one of the better "biodiversity" sites out there in terms of "web-tech". Perhaps his ulterior motive- associating his work in any way possible with a giant like google can only help his work in the long run, particularly in biodiversity/systematics studies which are notoriously underfunded...hint hint.
Hurry is the devil.
Haste makes waste.
It's too bad I wasn't trolling.
Its Wasmannia aropunctata not "Wasmannia Auropunctata", the species name is never in caps. No chance in hell the editors would catch that though...
Whoa. Your obviously a bit of a GenBank newb. There are papers where whole *organisms* were missequenced and identified incorrectly then submitted to Genbank under misidentifications. And not just minor problems, but across phyla (fungi identified as insects for example). Just because Genbank aligns your data and suggests there might be errors has absolutely nothing to do what you call it or how it gets submitted. We have several projects we are working on 20 percent or more of sequences we retrieved from genbank are not the gene that they say they are, who knows if the are what they claim to be identified as (data only as good as the person doing the identification of course). Genbank doesn't even have a tiny fraction of scientific names in its taxonomy database- how can it be solid reference? Are there error checking measures? Yes. Are there sequences retracted daily from genbank from errors? Yes.
Possibly, but not necessarily so. There is no "species" defining gene of course. And the dream of one (such as COI) that will provide all answers, is just that, a dream. A barcode is a unique identifier for an *already identified object*. If you don't know what your species are in the first place, you can't give it a barcode. Genetic differences can alert one that there might be a new species there, but they can't recognize the presence of a new species without supporting evidence. Most upper year evolution classes will point out there are 10s if not 100s of species definitions. Suggesting that there is only one, based on data from 1 or a few genes, is absurd, and clearly not scientific. This project is a major buyer-beware. It is steeped in politics (funding of course), and some would argue not science. Many of the methods proposed in it have not been rigourously tested in peer-reviewed science.
That said, it is exiciting that initiatives like this are drawing attention to the importance of biodiversity, and good results will come from this and related projects. Just don't assume its the be-all and end all!
1) Genbank taxonomy is notoriously horrid, as any practicing systematist knows. 2_ Anyone can submit any sequence to genbank and call it what they want, without any measure of quality control. Of course the errors can be caught, and annotated, but this is not the type of system you want for barcoding.
I've been to several debates regarding this technology. In fact, the "kicker" slide used in these talks is a mocked-up little tri-corder like gadget which you insert your leg/organism/leaf etch into. The tri-coder sequences the bit rapidly, and spits out the pertinent data. Of course this is just a vision of the future, but its funny that they make no qualms about presenting the potential tool as a tri-corder or star-trek like gadget.
By definition.
Mod parent up. The slashdot bit is misleading, 40,000 books in the pilot is hardly 15,000,000. This is a pilot project only.
http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
for a big list
You're halfway there already in Mozilla, bookmarking groups of tags is possible now already (and handy!).
Gestures seemed like a gimik, but man, now I'm hooked, not hard to believe that they will revolutionize the way we browse down the road, obviously in conjunction with broswers like Moz/FF. They are particularly useful when you need to do many reloads while building web pages and when flipping through tabs. Try them, give them a chance. Navigation from wherever you are without moving the pointer to a button (yes kbd can do this too) is fabulous. The degree of customization is awesome too.
Fairly widely acknowledged in the real world (tm) that the worst jobs are roofing (+/-40c + tar + slant) and road paving crews (heat+more tar+idiot drivers). Mindless repetition and fumes are bad for the brain.
Would have thought astronomers would have had a naming convention already, its a pretty "old" science. Perhaps they will adopt something like that used in biological sciences, wherein there are a number of different "codes" [1] [2] [3] by which organisms are named. These codes are currently being challenged by a new system that has many up in arms...
its true,
what you don't hear is that on that tree you can bet that there were literaly hundreds of insect, fungi, and bacteria species that had host-specific relationships to that tree...hundreds for the price of one
A&M researchers, while dissapointed with their non-cloned cat, happily pointed out that it can be used in their revamped cold-fusion machine which generates ulimited energy from fur.
The alternative, which academic science really doesn't like, is to not cite the papers you read. See Wolfram's latest where he clearly reads much but cites *nothing*. Perhaps that's really what he means by a "new kind of science."
Not to be a naysayer...but I will anyways. What happens in 30 years when a massive electromagnetic field wipes out all digital machines (possibly in conjuction with some attempt by humans to wipe out the robots taking over the world...those damn robots!)? By then 15 years of scientific publication may be more or less completely digital, and all gone, gone. Better hope we never lose access to that handy-dandy resource electricity....
Don't know what kind of tools are available to editors but...but why don't slashdot editors encorperate a bayesian duplicate submission detector in their "editing" process. Perhaps it would help them from spamming their own site?!?!?