Yes bad. We have *exactly* the same deal here. However, if you look closely at your tuituion and fees costs I'm sure you'll see an additional/increase in your "computer-access" fee or some-such that wasn't there before. In our case it just so happens that the increase in fees, (over a total of four years at school), is slightly more than the retail (not student) cost of MS office. If you want all the software available (how many of the 45,000 undergrads are going to use.net???) you *might* come out ahead.
Our school has also had some really misleading information about this great "deal". In one place we are told that we retain the lisence for as long as we are at school. The sales/distribution rep claimed that it was a "sure thing" that school's renewal of the aggreement would occur in the following years. However, when I quized her she admitted that we only have a one year agreement with M$, and that as soon as that year is up the school has the option to not renew...in which case your lisence is no good (not that people will abide but still). Nice.
Too many comments from people worrying about getting jobs and being "legitimized". Whatever happened to learning something for learning sake? This is free information that you would otherwise have to pay *thousands* of dollars for. Damn cool.
And another thing... In intro to grad-stats this semester I've been told that locking down/encrypting course-notes etc will be the wave of the future, this from a state school. Heaven forbid that Joe-taxpayer actually be able to learn on their own! YOU pay taxes that support ME going to school. Shouldn't you have access to all the information generated by your tax-dollars?
This isn't too novel. The Tragically Hip's latest CD (thehip.com) "In Violet Light" comes with a credit-card like card (only available with purchase). Allows for discounts, prizes etc.
Reading slashdot moz article, moves mouse, crash. Restart, gets to splash, crash, again...crash, again...crash...ok 3 times a charm, back to 1.0 (win2k). Nuts...maybe tomorrow.
Arrg...its a *combination* of probabilities, both good and bad, that's why it works. Just because one is.99 (for alternate) doesn't mean that that e-mail will be rejected outright! ALL probabilities from the good and bad hashes are taken into acount.
Actually its a pattern of characters its working with, English has nothing to do with it. The concept will work for any pattern as he's definied it and therfore any language.
This is the brilliant part, and crucial to the endeavour, and so easy to implement!
It appears all the nay-sayers here haven't even read the article (no surprise). With as little code as needed to implement this it should be a must in the next mozilla mail/pine etc. code base.
Its a plot, the French have decided to take back Canada by dropping old people on them... Oh well at least he won't hit nothin' too important when he crashes into Saskatoon.
Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers? - MORAY
on
POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
·
· Score: 1
Spiders aren't bugs. In the movie they actually get the order name right..."aranae", but the family names are all screwed up, can't remember off the top of my head what they were but jumping spiders are "Salticidae", not whatever they said. The other two names (trap door and something else) were way off too if I remember right...
Amen. Don't get me wrong. I love this kind of initiative, and I would love to be a part of it. It's a very exciting time to be doing taxonomy (which is really bioinformatics...most people just don't know it yet). Its particularly fun to think about what we can do with the internet. One idea would be to get a system in place that would allow many observers (i.e. analogous to slashdot readers) to comment on images that may or may not represent more than one species. Half the battle is finding the characters that separate the species...why not have a million pairs of eyes searching for them? Your recruiting point is bang on. Find the best people and you will get the work done. Give $$ to the wrong ones and you'll never see products.
Couple of responses. First a sheepish apology for the terrible grammar/spelling of the original post. I was in rant mode.
> So, for starters, and since you are a trained taxonomist, what do you think is the fair ballpark >number of species on the planet?
I don't know. I agree with your questioning the total estimates of species, this is very difficult to do as far as I can tell. I will say that in the field there is a somewhat of a "law" (and I use that term in the most unscientific way) that states that every time you do a revision of a group of taxa you double that number of taxa in that group. So for instance I am revising a group that previously had 7 available species names and I now recognize over 20 taxa. A big reason this happens is that we have more specimens, that are better curated, and more powerful tools to observe those specimens. When the group I work with was last revised (around 100 years ago) they had no scanning electron micrographs, we do now...and they reveal a lot that was missed before.
In the family I work with there are over 4000 species estimated to occur (and I believe this to be accurate) and 2000 available species names. What is very important to note is that just because a name is *available* doesn't mean its describing a unique species. Of those 2000 available names, many are synonyms, describing the same species. So the answer to described/undescribed...easily less than half. Finding out names are good and which are not is very difficult. There are many laws that govern this. Note that a HUGE problems is that these laws only apply to "animal" names. Plant names use a completely different system. Want to catalog all the species? You have to reconcile more than one system of naming somehow.
As said elsewhere the number of total species will depend on the species definition. A phylogenetic species concept is commonly used for those who have no biological evidence available. Once more is understood about biology/ecology/DNA of the organism it frequently turns out that a finer level of resolution can be defined. For the purposes of the All Species they will undoubtedly use the phylogenetic species concept.
Does every expedition come up with new species? In the group I work with, almost always (how exciting!). I can take you to a location (of my choice), we can trap bugs for a day or so, I guarantee you we get an undescribed species in the group I work with. Not so for all areas, obviously impacted areas (e.g. crop fields) are depauperate. Also not so for new groups. Want to describe a new species of butterfly/long horned beetle in North America...very difficult to do because they are so popular and many people work on them (unless you work with micro-lepidoptera). Want to describe a new bird or chordate? Almost never.
There are such curves that you seek in some areas, and its frequently debated how they should be done. Its very well known that you capture the common widespread species first, the rare ones last, the payoff decreases exponentially, the more you know, that harder you have to work to get the new species. You may want to check out this book which has some modern, if not somewhat controversial ideas, about the subject, and lots of technical ideas on modeling the problem.
P.S. Look at the massive administration set up for All Species...and they hope to have a "pilot project" (read actual field work) within a year...my guess is it take 3 years before a single species is named from this initiative. Ask again how many of these luminaries listed on the people page are actually describing species now (many have in the past)? Call me a skeptic.
Many people are dealing with these problems. They are actually relatively easily dealt with in RDMSs...for the most part. Check out the hymenoptera database at Ohio State. There is a data model burried in there somewhere. Also check out Species 2000 (Kansas) or Mandala out of Illionois.
If you were a *entomologist*. You hit the nail on the head. You have to do *lots* of background of research. Then follow all the rules of the zoological code of nomeclature. MANY MANY species are named more than once, sometimes very many times. To find out the proper name is very taxing (pun intended). There are numerous databases that are begining to store all this nomenclatural information, its and exciting time to be a taxonomist. The use of DNA will come in time. DNA is completely useless in the field at this time..you still have to know morphology when you are out on the hunt. It is important to note that nobody is going to fund you to develop assays that can identifiy species IN THE FIELD using molecular techniques unless you have very economically important species . This work has to my knowledge actually never been done (for insects).
IAAT. Pipe dream: Fund the Grass roots
on
Every Species on Earth
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
IAAT (I am a taxonomist). This is a major pipe dream (at least the do it in 25 years worth).
In insect taxonomy if you are a highly trained (world class) you can describe around 50 species PER YEAR (at least doing an adequate job). The (small) family I work in has over 2000 undescribed species. There are fewer than 8 experts in the world on this group, only 2-4 are actually producing names actively, and these at rate of much fewer than 50/year. This is a relatively small family of Insects, there are many many larger ones with many many more undescribed species. You do the math.
The biggest problems is finding funding to do this work. Though taxonomists are invaluable to almost all biological studies (if you can't name your study organisms correctly you can't repeat the science) they are among the least well funded. Those that are funded are primarily big mega projects (like this one) that don't understand the nuts and bolt (i.e. code for computer buffs)...they are the administrators that the BOFH hates. So grandiose plans are contrived with know research into how one actually goes about training or naming the species involved. I've seen this happen several times (in insects there are thousands of trapped insects waiting to be sorted and dished out to experts but there is no funding to train taxonomist to be able to do identifications at even rough levels (family/genus) that would allow managable units of specimens to be passed along to "alpha" taxonomists (those that name species.
As for the molecular folks who say taxonomy is passay.. this is a joke. Before they (moleculoids) can even begin to sequence they have to have some level of taxonomic background in place in order to even select the individuals they will sequence.
If you know anything about taxonomy you know that a major problem is dealing with the nomenclature (how are species given names). You basically have to reference everything that is done in the past to ensure that your not naming a species that is already named. Just figuring out what has been done in the past is very problematic. There is very little funding available to deal with these problems. There is also very little infrastrcutre available to deal with these (there are more and more databases avaialable...and this is good).
THERE IS NO GLOBAL CLEARING HOUSE FOR SPECIES NAMES. Nobody has the time or resources to even complile a complete list of species that have already been named, let alone those to be named!!!
The long and short of this rant...you $$$ folks give money to those doing the grunt work...the actuall taxonomists, not the databases/web sites etc. Give it to the amature collector who knows what they are doing.
Something like this has already been done, and very effectively with screworm . You computer people for the most part don't understand biology, especially fiddlin' with it...which is funny cause you like to hack everything else?!?!
Is that beyond academia and geeks hidden in dark rooms nobody knows Linux exists. Its not apps or anything beyond that....M$ spends billions on advertising that it exists as an option for your everday flying-happy-ray-o-light type person....Linux spends nothing. Poll 100 average Americans (ok maybe a bad example), I bet on average maybe 5% have even heard of linux...
All four books in this series, and to a lesser degree the following trilogies/duologies are must read for anyone prentending to be a SF buff. Great colorful SF.
easily solved...peer review the peer reviewers, only allow trusted reviewers. Face it, not everyone should peer review everything, to some degree, bad or good, this has to be figured out ahead of time with respect to "serious" science. So do this, then set up slashbiology. Part of the problem with peer review is it takes time, a forum in this format is an _excellent_ way to peer review, quickly highlighting relevent info. It will happen.
This is very true. I can't wait to break off a little bit of a Linnean holotype for a bit of DNA ,;) . This of course will provide much more data for diagnosing new species and species relationships ultimately fueling the debate on "linnean" versus "phylogenetic" nomenclature. Now if the zoological community would get off the a$ses and create/support a universal warehouse for all nomenclature.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes bad. We have *exactly* the same deal here. However, if you look closely at your tuituion and fees costs I'm sure you'll see an additional/increase in your "computer-access" fee or some-such that wasn't there before. In our case it just so happens that the increase in fees, (over a total of four years at school), is slightly more than the retail (not student) cost of MS office. If you want all the software available (how many of the 45,000 undergrads are going to use .net???) you *might* come out ahead.
Our school has also had some really misleading information about this great "deal". In one place we are told that we retain the lisence for as long as we are at school. The sales/distribution rep claimed that it was a "sure thing" that school's renewal of the aggreement would occur in the following years. However, when I quized her she admitted that we only have a one year agreement with M$, and that as soon as that year is up the school has the option to not renew...in which case your lisence is no good (not that people will abide but still). Nice.
Check it out... do something like these folks, except in your city.
Too many comments from people worrying about getting jobs and being "legitimized". Whatever happened to learning something for learning sake? This is free information that you would otherwise have to pay *thousands* of dollars for. Damn cool.
And another thing... In intro to grad-stats this semester I've been told that locking down/encrypting course-notes etc will be the wave of the future, this from a state school. Heaven forbid that Joe-taxpayer actually be able to learn on their own! YOU pay taxes that support ME going to school. Shouldn't you have access to all the information generated by your tax-dollars?
This isn't too novel. The Tragically Hip's latest CD (thehip.com) "In Violet Light" comes with a credit-card like card (only available with purchase). Allows for discounts, prizes etc.
Reading slashdot moz article, moves mouse, crash. Restart, gets to splash, crash, again...crash, again...crash...ok 3 times a charm, back to 1.0 (win2k). Nuts...maybe tomorrow.
Arrg...its a *combination* of probabilities, both good and bad, that's why it works. Just because one is .99 (for alternate) doesn't mean that that e-mail will be rejected outright! ALL probabilities from the good and bad hashes are taken into acount.
How do you figure inconveniance? Only one confirming e-mail is all it takes and that person is in your db...a small price to pay!
Actually its a pattern of characters its working with, English has nothing to do with it. The concept will work for any pattern as he's definied it and therfore any language.
This is the brilliant part, and crucial to the endeavour, and so easy to implement!
It appears all the nay-sayers here haven't even read the article (no surprise). With as little code as needed to implement this it should be a must in the next mozilla mail/pine etc. code base.
Its a plot, the French have decided to take back Canada by dropping old people on them... Oh well at least he won't hit nothin' too important when he crashes into Saskatoon.
Moray rocks, pretty cheap too.
Spiders aren't bugs. In the movie they actually get the order name right..."aranae", but the family names are all screwed up, can't remember off the top of my head what they were but jumping spiders are "Salticidae", not whatever they said. The other two names (trap door and something else) were way off too if I remember right...
Amen. Don't get me wrong. I love this kind of initiative, and I would love to be a part of it. It's a very exciting time to be doing taxonomy (which is really bioinformatics...most people just don't know it yet). Its particularly fun to think about what we can do with the internet. One idea would be to get a system in place that would allow many observers (i.e. analogous to slashdot readers) to comment on images that may or may not represent more than one species. Half the battle is finding the characters that separate the species...why not have a million pairs of eyes searching for them? Your recruiting point is bang on. Find the best people and you will get the work done. Give $$ to the wrong ones and you'll never see products.
Couple of responses. First a sheepish apology for the terrible grammar/spelling of the original post. I was in rant mode.
> So, for starters, and since you are a trained taxonomist, what do you think is the fair ballpark >number of species on the planet?
I don't know. I agree with your questioning the total estimates of species, this is very difficult to do as far as I can tell. I will say that in the field there is a somewhat of a "law" (and I use that term in the most unscientific way) that states that every time you do a revision of a group of taxa you double that number of taxa in that group. So for instance I am revising a group that previously had 7 available species names and I now recognize over 20 taxa. A big reason this happens is that we have more specimens, that are better curated, and more powerful tools to observe those specimens. When the group I work with was last revised (around 100 years ago) they had no scanning electron micrographs, we do now...and they reveal a lot that was missed before.
In the family I work with there are over 4000 species estimated to occur (and I believe this to be accurate) and 2000 available species names. What is very important to note is that just because a name is *available* doesn't mean its describing a unique species. Of those 2000 available names, many are synonyms, describing the same species. So the answer to described/undescribed...easily less than half. Finding out names are good and which are not is very difficult. There are many laws that govern this. Note that a HUGE problems is that these laws only apply to "animal" names. Plant names use a completely different system. Want to catalog all the species? You have to reconcile more than one system of naming somehow.
As said elsewhere the number of total species will depend on the species definition. A phylogenetic species concept is commonly used for those who have no biological evidence available. Once more is understood about biology/ecology/DNA of the organism it frequently turns out that a finer level of resolution can be defined. For the purposes of the All Species they will undoubtedly use the phylogenetic species concept.
Does every expedition come up with new species? In the group I work with, almost always (how exciting!). I can take you to a location (of my choice), we can trap bugs for a day or so, I guarantee you we get an undescribed species in the group I work with. Not so for all areas, obviously impacted areas (e.g. crop fields) are depauperate. Also not so for new groups. Want to describe a new species of butterfly/long horned beetle in North America...very difficult to do because they are so popular and many people work on them (unless you work with micro-lepidoptera). Want to describe a new bird or chordate? Almost never.
There are such curves that you seek in some areas, and its frequently debated how they should be done. Its very well known that you capture the common widespread species first, the rare ones last, the payoff decreases exponentially, the more you know, that harder you have to work to get the new species. You may want to check out this book which has some modern, if not somewhat controversial ideas, about the subject, and lots of technical ideas on modeling the problem.
P.S. Look at the massive administration set up for All Species...and they hope to have a "pilot project" (read actual field work) within a year...my guess is it take 3 years before a single species is named from this initiative. Ask again how many of these luminaries listed on the people page are actually describing species now (many have in the past)? Call me a skeptic.
Many people are dealing with these problems. They are actually relatively easily dealt with in RDMSs...for the most part. Check out the hymenoptera database at Ohio State. There is a data model burried in there somewhere. Also check out Species 2000 (Kansas) or Mandala out of Illionois.
If you were a *entomologist*.
You hit the nail on the head. You have to do *lots* of background of research. Then follow all the rules of the zoological code of nomeclature. MANY MANY species are named more than once, sometimes very many times. To find out the proper name is very taxing (pun intended).
There are numerous databases that are begining to store all this nomenclatural information, its and exciting time to be a taxonomist. The use of DNA will come in time. DNA is completely useless in the field at this time..you still have to know morphology when you are out on the hunt. It is important to note that nobody is going to fund you to develop assays that can identifiy species IN THE FIELD using molecular techniques unless you have very economically important species . This work has to my knowledge actually never been done (for insects).
IAAT (I am a taxonomist). This is a major pipe dream (at least the do it in 25 years worth).
In insect taxonomy if you are a highly trained (world class) you can describe around 50 species PER YEAR (at least doing an adequate job). The (small) family I work in has over 2000 undescribed species. There are fewer than 8 experts in the world on this group, only 2-4 are actually producing names actively, and these at rate of much fewer than 50/year. This is a relatively small family of Insects, there are many many larger ones with many many more undescribed species. You do the math.
The biggest problems is finding funding to do this work. Though taxonomists are invaluable to almost all biological studies (if you can't name your study organisms correctly you can't repeat the science) they are among the least well funded. Those that are funded are primarily big mega projects (like this one) that don't understand the nuts and bolt (i.e. code for computer buffs)...they are the administrators that the BOFH hates. So grandiose plans are contrived with know research into how one actually goes about training or naming the species involved. I've seen this happen several times (in insects there are thousands of trapped insects waiting to be sorted and dished out to experts but there is no funding to train taxonomist to be able to do identifications at even rough levels (family/genus) that would allow managable units of specimens to be passed along to "alpha" taxonomists (those that name species.
As for the molecular folks who say taxonomy is passay.. this is a joke. Before they (moleculoids) can even begin to sequence they have to have some level of taxonomic background in place in order to even select the individuals they will sequence.
If you know anything about taxonomy you know that a major problem is dealing with the nomenclature (how are species given names). You basically have to reference everything that is done in the past to ensure that your not naming a species that is already named. Just figuring out what has been done in the past is very problematic. There is very little funding available to deal with these problems. There is also very little infrastrcutre available to deal with these (there are more and more databases avaialable...and this is good).
THERE IS NO GLOBAL CLEARING HOUSE FOR SPECIES NAMES. Nobody has the time or resources to even complile a complete list of species that have already been named, let alone those to be named!!!
The long and short of this rant...you $$$ folks give money to those doing the grunt work...the actuall taxonomists, not the databases/web sites etc. Give it to the amature collector who knows what they are doing.
Good history. Excellent for the layman. On Amazon
Something like this has already been done, and very effectively with screworm .
You computer people for the most part don't understand biology, especially fiddlin' with it...which is funny cause you like to hack everything else?!?!
Is that beyond academia and geeks hidden in dark rooms nobody knows Linux exists. Its not apps or anything beyond that....M$ spends billions on advertising that it exists as an option for your everday flying-happy-ray-o-light type person....Linux spends nothing. Poll 100 average Americans (ok maybe a bad example), I bet on average maybe 5% have even heard of linux...
All four books in this series, and to a lesser degree the following trilogies/duologies are must read for anyone prentending to be a SF buff. Great colorful SF.
easily solved...peer review the peer reviewers, only allow trusted reviewers. Face it, not everyone should peer review everything, to some degree, bad or good, this has to be figured out ahead of time with respect to "serious" science. So do this, then set up slashbiology. Part of the problem with peer review is it takes time, a forum in this format is an _excellent_ way to peer review, quickly highlighting relevent info. It will happen.
This is very true. I can't wait to break off a little bit of a Linnean holotype for a bit of DNA , ;) . This of course will provide much more data for diagnosing new species and species relationships ultimately fueling the debate on "linnean" versus "phylogenetic" nomenclature. Now if the zoological community would get off the a$ses and create/support a universal warehouse for all nomenclature.
10 input "]"; 20 get A$ 30 print "why would you want to do that?" 40 goto 10 ]save hello
cluster of these thing would be very useful for the maximum clique of Slashdot users