I have sympathy for Shekman's argument, but it's the same story throughout publishing, not just for science. Publishers build their reputation on brilliant authors, but I don't know a single publisher that only publishes brilliant books/journals. Where his argument wobbles for me is when he mentions elife as being free to view but sponsored by industry. How will he and his sponsors measure success of that venture? The cynic in me suggests that as well as readership figures and brilliance of content, reputation will form a part. It may be softer than the Nature approach, but perhaps that just means it isn't as successful yet.
Ask them what they want and adapt accordingly. They probably won't ask for pron because they can get that elsewhere and aren't dumb enough to think you can offer that at school. But if you get them to choose from a list of things that you know you are capable of offering them, you will give them some ownership in the club. They often find that easier than starting from scratch. In my experience, high school kids rarely get asked their opinions about anything that matters directly to them . . . and if you ask their opinions your club will start to matter to them.
Although most fruit and veg (but not grasses such as wheat and barley) are insect-pollinated, it's not true to say that honeybees have the monopoly. European studies suggest that honeybees account for around 30% of insect pollination, with the rest being down to flies, bumble bees, wasps, beetles, moths, etc. In Britain, most biologists accept that honeybees are non-native parts of our fauna, and some people think that they can outcompete native bee species, although the science for this is slim.
Nor is it true to suggest that honeybees are necessarily the most efficient pollinators. Many native bees, for example, put in longer hours in colder conditions (and require no winter feeding) than lazy old honeybees, and many wildflowers (but not, I grant you crop species) have co-evolved with their native pollinator hosts and have pollen and nectar that is unavailable to honeybees, either because of the flower's size and structure or because the nectar is released at night.
Is it me, or am I the only person who searches for things *they don't already know?* As personalisation increases, our very idea of relevance becomes more limited. If I search for music and this new-fangled searchy thing is going to throw me stuff that I already like, how am I ever going to get the chance of liking anything radically different? Oh, I know. How about by not using Google+
It's not a book, but George Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language should be required reading for anyone working on usability. So often the focus is on the graphics, the number of clicks of a mouse, etc, but the language used and how that fits the audience's understanding is overlooked. An example: in the early days of web design, I was presented with a page with a link to "FAQs". This was for the general public. I asked all my colleagues what FAQ meant and no-one knew. "It's the industry standard term" I was told. When we changed the link to read "Frequently Asked Questions" the number of phone calls to our enquiries department fell. You have to go where the audience is, not just where you want them to be.
Doesn't "how much is too much" depend more on what sort of data you are talking about than the systems used to record and analyse it? Aircraft risk analysts would surely argue that they need all the data they can get to help prevent every instance of catastrophic failure. Biologists on the other hand are used to working with extraordinarily fuzzy data and still drawing valid conclusions
I hope you mean you don't volunteer because that's what *they* say rather than that's what you are. Online and offline risks to children are manageable through carefully thought out and followed procedures rather than legislation alone, but at present it's not even clear what is legislation and what's someone's view of common sense rules.
I see where you are coming from ledow and sympathise from a user's viewpoint, but the answer to your question is that I care about the law and so does my company. I run a large UK children's club as part of a larger charity, and not surprisingly, many of the kids are not only on Facebook (shock!) but also prefer to communicate via Facebook rather than by something as 20th Century as email. Other people in my organisation are still not only scared by all the usual scary internet things, but also keep saying that even our own message boards *must* remain exclusively for adults for legal reasons. I dispute that and would like to have ways of backing up my view that not only do we need to communicate in ways that children are themselves using, but that the any rules on social media are under the control of the people who make the rules up, not the lawmakers.
So far as I know, in the UK, there is nothing legal to prevent children of any age taking part in social media. (If I am wrong, please correct me). The European Data Protection Act is often quoted, but is not age specific, it just says that the expected target audience should understand what they are signing up to, and most agencies reckon that understanding comes at around the age of 12, which, coincidentally, is the same age at which they can be legally culpable of violent crimes. So if a bunch of savvy 11 year olds want to communicate among themselves via Facebook entirely within the UK, without asking for parental consent (or even with it) are they breaking anyone's laws? Just because Facebook tries to work within California's rules, does that mean that UK use by young children is a problem - not counting the whole appropriateness/stalker issue?
In 1969, Ken Loach's film, Kes, sparked a craze for kestrels as pets in Britain. The RSPB (The UK's largest wild bird conservation charity) were really worried that so many kestrels were being taken illegally from nests, especially at a time when the species was in trouble thanks ot the DDT poisoning scandal of the time. The RSPB was concerned that Hedwig may spark a similar craze in the UK, but it simply hasn't happened. Whether that is because there are very few owls around (and no snowy owls breeding in the UK), or the result of 40 years more environmental education is debatable. However, as India has comprehensively trashed its biodiversity in the recent years (eg 99 per cent decline in vulture populations in the last 10 years), perhaps Harry Bloody Potter is as convenient a scapegoat as any other.
Same thing: barn swallow and red-rumped swallow nest in Europe the summer and winter in southern Africa. So it's not what the bird was but when it was that determines whether it is European or African, not that I am clever enough to claim any uncertainty involvement between birds and LHC.
Merino wool underpants have many of the same properties but are far too warm for long-distance cycling. Perhaps these new-fangled shreddies will be the answer. They won't stop the cyclist's distinctive aroma, but could be an answer to some of the bacterial problems that are neatly summed up in the phrases saddle sores and bum itch.
There is a great deal of opposition to biofuels in Europe at present, not just because of the inefficiencies outlined in other comments, but because of the effect on biodiversity. See the RSPB's website for example. Ripping up rainforest to plant palm oil to create biofuels is ridiculous on so many levels, and this Swift stuff seems no better. The fact that it can grow on land not suitable for crops sets my alarm bells ringing. That land is often the last refuge for so many of the species that nature conservationists are worried about already.
I suspect part of the reasoning behind the bill is about the general desensitising effect that any child porn images can have and a desire to keep such images away from mainstream thought. Barring the huge amount of assumptions in that last sentence, the sentiment is probably ok. But also it is potential protection for any children who are forced (either in person, or by proxy through illegal photographic images) to model for these dodgy artworks. And no, there will be no progression from this proposal to banning The Simpsons. That's not the way the British legislature works.
Bats (yes, with a B, not cats) will purr for similar reasons to cats. Friends of mine kept a disabled Noctule bat (a large British species) which used to snuggle up for warmth and purr loudly with apparent contentment. I think ferrets (domestic polecats) will purr as well.
The aims of ARKive were not dissimilar, but this now seems to have transmuted into a lightweight picture and sound library when they realised what they had bitten off. I wish the project well, but can't help thinking that the notion of a one-stop-shop for any huge subject online is fundamentally flawed (except for the ability to reap funding benefits). There are so many interpretations of what is valuable information that to list it all becomes unusable.
The safety and parenting arguments have had a good airing, but these aren't what concerns me about mobile phone use for the very young. I am more concerned about the effect they have on mental and society development. There is a lot of concern about how children have become more watchers than participants in anything from sport to natural history, as all media have become more sophisticated. A huge number of people now prefer to watch than to take part, which leads to a worldview that the only interesting things that happen are somewhere else. I grew up in a small town and that felt to be the case anyway, and that was in the days of punch card computing.
Add to that the fact that groups of teenagers spend more time concentrating on their text messages than on the people they have chosen to be physically with and this sense of alienation looks set to increase.
Going for a walk in the country without a mobile phone (or even one that's switched off)can be liberating in part because the only interest and entertainment must come from who and what's close to hand. If we want to encourage a generation that investigates their surroundings and engages with it, giving them unlimited access to mobiles seems like a retrograde step.
As a watercolour pigment, cobalt green is increasingly hard to find. Winsor&Newton no longer stock, nor DalerRowney. The only remaining major supplier seems to be Schminke. It's a really useful colour for making lively blacks, but the point of mentioning here is that these paintmakers all cite poison/health/product liability issues as reasons for its withdrawal. Best not kiss your circuit board any more than you should lick your brush tips.
Birders use a digital camera/spotting scope combo to get increasingly good pictures of distant birds. This is digiscoping. A device that allowed that same clarity and to send pictures to your mates would have great appeal. Send two: 1) here's a stupidly rare bird I just found; 2) here's me scaring it away so you can't see it. Well, when I said mates . . .
A guy in Finland (where else, eh?) is already starting to do this with his 3G phone and the results are starting to impress.
I don't deny the lens issue among others, and this isn't a replacement for high-end cameras, but don't write off the potential value of a hig-quality phone/camera combo for some pretty geeky pursuits.
In some ways there is little new in this research, except that they have used technology to corroborate observations that generations of birders have made. There have even been notes published in British Birds magazine about terns and other long-distance migrants using rivers, canals and roads as routemarkers, just as a pilot may.
The truth of the matter is that birds use whatever calculation is most appropriate at the time - so the same terns that use roads on route north will have had to migrate over the sea, where the position of the sun and even smell and infrasound cues would be more important.
Pigeons are notorious for being able to navigate homeward from overseas and from distances where they can't possibly have experienced landmarks to learn. What is certainly true is that pigeons have a remarkable ability to memorise their home area, but perhaps they don't like the hard work of calculating their position relative to the sun any more than most people enjoy mapreading - why take a compass bearing if you can see your way home?
So far as I know, the hawks moving into urban areas in both the US and Britain are only doing so either as a result of habitats elsewhere being screwed up (eg by changes in land management), or where they have filled up available wild habitats. So, perversely, if there are enough hawks around for people to notice them colliding with windows, that could be pretty good news. To a peregrine, an office block with associated pigeons is structurally so similar to a sea cliff full of seabirds that going urban makes sense.
First, a billion birds sounds like an over-estimate, but even if it isn't it probably won't make any serious difference to any bird populations. Every year, most birds die, which is why they need to raise lots of young to keep going at all. Previous studies of birds vs windows, birds vs traffic, birds vs cats generally show that those that die are effectively part of the natural surplus rather than this being new deaths. Not much comfort for the individual bird, but hey.
Secondly, most birds that conservationists (and yes, we are as scientific and geeky as the average/. er) are really worried about don't live in built-up areas so the impact with glass is likely to be less of a problem.
Thirdly, window stickers (especially those shaped like a hawk) can sharply reduce the level of impacts especially against windows that look like a fly-through to somewhere else.
And finally, when you find a bird that hit a window, someone will say it's broken its neck. Not so. Birds' necks are much longer and more flexible than most people realise until they see a lolling corpse. The commonest cause of death against a window is brain haemorrage.
Slashdot Mirror
I have sympathy for Shekman's argument, but it's the same story throughout publishing, not just for science. Publishers build their reputation on brilliant authors, but I don't know a single publisher that only publishes brilliant books/journals. Where his argument wobbles for me is when he mentions elife as being free to view but sponsored by industry. How will he and his sponsors measure success of that venture? The cynic in me suggests that as well as readership figures and brilliance of content, reputation will form a part. It may be softer than the Nature approach, but perhaps that just means it isn't as successful yet.
True enough . . . hence the "pick from a list of stuff you can deliver" in the rest of my post.
Ask them what they want and adapt accordingly. They probably won't ask for pron because they can get that elsewhere and aren't dumb enough to think you can offer that at school. But if you get them to choose from a list of things that you know you are capable of offering them, you will give them some ownership in the club. They often find that easier than starting from scratch. In my experience, high school kids rarely get asked their opinions about anything that matters directly to them . . . and if you ask their opinions your club will start to matter to them.
Although most fruit and veg (but not grasses such as wheat and barley) are insect-pollinated, it's not true to say that honeybees have the monopoly. European studies suggest that honeybees account for around 30% of insect pollination, with the rest being down to flies, bumble bees, wasps, beetles, moths, etc. In Britain, most biologists accept that honeybees are non-native parts of our fauna, and some people think that they can outcompete native bee species, although the science for this is slim. Nor is it true to suggest that honeybees are necessarily the most efficient pollinators. Many native bees, for example, put in longer hours in colder conditions (and require no winter feeding) than lazy old honeybees, and many wildflowers (but not, I grant you crop species) have co-evolved with their native pollinator hosts and have pollen and nectar that is unavailable to honeybees, either because of the flower's size and structure or because the nectar is released at night.
Is it me, or am I the only person who searches for things *they don't already know?* As personalisation increases, our very idea of relevance becomes more limited. If I search for music and this new-fangled searchy thing is going to throw me stuff that I already like, how am I ever going to get the chance of liking anything radically different? Oh, I know. How about by not using Google+
It's not a book, but George Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language should be required reading for anyone working on usability. So often the focus is on the graphics, the number of clicks of a mouse, etc, but the language used and how that fits the audience's understanding is overlooked. An example: in the early days of web design, I was presented with a page with a link to "FAQs". This was for the general public. I asked all my colleagues what FAQ meant and no-one knew. "It's the industry standard term" I was told. When we changed the link to read "Frequently Asked Questions" the number of phone calls to our enquiries department fell. You have to go where the audience is, not just where you want them to be.
Doesn't "how much is too much" depend more on what sort of data you are talking about than the systems used to record and analyse it? Aircraft risk analysts would surely argue that they need all the data they can get to help prevent every instance of catastrophic failure. Biologists on the other hand are used to working with extraordinarily fuzzy data and still drawing valid conclusions
I hope you mean you don't volunteer because that's what *they* say rather than that's what you are. Online and offline risks to children are manageable through carefully thought out and followed procedures rather than legislation alone, but at present it's not even clear what is legislation and what's someone's view of common sense rules.
I see where you are coming from ledow and sympathise from a user's viewpoint, but the answer to your question is that I care about the law and so does my company. I run a large UK children's club as part of a larger charity, and not surprisingly, many of the kids are not only on Facebook (shock!) but also prefer to communicate via Facebook rather than by something as 20th Century as email. Other people in my organisation are still not only scared by all the usual scary internet things, but also keep saying that even our own message boards *must* remain exclusively for adults for legal reasons. I dispute that and would like to have ways of backing up my view that not only do we need to communicate in ways that children are themselves using, but that the any rules on social media are under the control of the people who make the rules up, not the lawmakers.
So far as I know, in the UK, there is nothing legal to prevent children of any age taking part in social media. (If I am wrong, please correct me). The European Data Protection Act is often quoted, but is not age specific, it just says that the expected target audience should understand what they are signing up to, and most agencies reckon that understanding comes at around the age of 12, which, coincidentally, is the same age at which they can be legally culpable of violent crimes. So if a bunch of savvy 11 year olds want to communicate among themselves via Facebook entirely within the UK, without asking for parental consent (or even with it) are they breaking anyone's laws? Just because Facebook tries to work within California's rules, does that mean that UK use by young children is a problem - not counting the whole appropriateness/stalker issue?
In 1969, Ken Loach's film, Kes, sparked a craze for kestrels as pets in Britain. The RSPB (The UK's largest wild bird conservation charity) were really worried that so many kestrels were being taken illegally from nests, especially at a time when the species was in trouble thanks ot the DDT poisoning scandal of the time. The RSPB was concerned that Hedwig may spark a similar craze in the UK, but it simply hasn't happened. Whether that is because there are very few owls around (and no snowy owls breeding in the UK), or the result of 40 years more environmental education is debatable. However, as India has comprehensively trashed its biodiversity in the recent years (eg 99 per cent decline in vulture populations in the last 10 years), perhaps Harry Bloody Potter is as convenient a scapegoat as any other.
Same thing: barn swallow and red-rumped swallow nest in Europe the summer and winter in southern Africa. So it's not what the bird was but when it was that determines whether it is European or African, not that I am clever enough to claim any uncertainty involvement between birds and LHC.
Merino wool underpants have many of the same properties but are far too warm for long-distance cycling. Perhaps these new-fangled shreddies will be the answer. They won't stop the cyclist's distinctive aroma, but could be an answer to some of the bacterial problems that are neatly summed up in the phrases saddle sores and bum itch.
There is a great deal of opposition to biofuels in Europe at present, not just because of the inefficiencies outlined in other comments, but because of the effect on biodiversity. See the RSPB's website for example. Ripping up rainforest to plant palm oil to create biofuels is ridiculous on so many levels, and this Swift stuff seems no better. The fact that it can grow on land not suitable for crops sets my alarm bells ringing. That land is often the last refuge for so many of the species that nature conservationists are worried about already.
I suspect part of the reasoning behind the bill is about the general desensitising effect that any child porn images can have and a desire to keep such images away from mainstream thought. Barring the huge amount of assumptions in that last sentence, the sentiment is probably ok. But also it is potential protection for any children who are forced (either in person, or by proxy through illegal photographic images) to model for these dodgy artworks. And no, there will be no progression from this proposal to banning The Simpsons. That's not the way the British legislature works.
Bats (yes, with a B, not cats) will purr for similar reasons to cats. Friends of mine kept a disabled Noctule bat (a large British species) which used to snuggle up for warmth and purr loudly with apparent contentment. I think ferrets (domestic polecats) will purr as well.
The aims of ARKive were not dissimilar, but this now seems to have transmuted into a lightweight picture and sound library when they realised what they had bitten off. I wish the project well, but can't help thinking that the notion of a one-stop-shop for any huge subject online is fundamentally flawed (except for the ability to reap funding benefits). There are so many interpretations of what is valuable information that to list it all becomes unusable.
The safety and parenting arguments have had a good airing, but these aren't what concerns me about mobile phone use for the very young. I am more concerned about the effect they have on mental and society development. There is a lot of concern about how children have become more watchers than participants in anything from sport to natural history, as all media have become more sophisticated. A huge number of people now prefer to watch than to take part, which leads to a worldview that the only interesting things that happen are somewhere else. I grew up in a small town and that felt to be the case anyway, and that was in the days of punch card computing. Add to that the fact that groups of teenagers spend more time concentrating on their text messages than on the people they have chosen to be physically with and this sense of alienation looks set to increase. Going for a walk in the country without a mobile phone (or even one that's switched off)can be liberating in part because the only interest and entertainment must come from who and what's close to hand. If we want to encourage a generation that investigates their surroundings and engages with it, giving them unlimited access to mobiles seems like a retrograde step.
As a watercolour pigment, cobalt green is increasingly hard to find. Winsor&Newton no longer stock, nor DalerRowney. The only remaining major supplier seems to be Schminke. It's a really useful colour for making lively blacks, but the point of mentioning here is that these paintmakers all cite poison/health/product liability issues as reasons for its withdrawal. Best not kiss your circuit board any more than you should lick your brush tips.
Birders use a digital camera/spotting scope combo to get increasingly good pictures of distant birds. This is digiscoping. A device that allowed that same clarity and to send pictures to your mates would have great appeal. Send two: 1) here's a stupidly rare bird I just found; 2) here's me scaring it away so you can't see it. Well, when I said mates . . . A guy in Finland (where else, eh?) is already starting to do this with his 3G phone and the results are starting to impress. I don't deny the lens issue among others, and this isn't a replacement for high-end cameras, but don't write off the potential value of a hig-quality phone/camera combo for some pretty geeky pursuits.
The truth of the matter is that birds use whatever calculation is most appropriate at the time - so the same terns that use roads on route north will have had to migrate over the sea, where the position of the sun and even smell and infrasound cues would be more important.
Pigeons are notorious for being able to navigate homeward from overseas and from distances where they can't possibly have experienced landmarks to learn. What is certainly true is that pigeons have a remarkable ability to memorise their home area, but perhaps they don't like the hard work of calculating their position relative to the sun any more than most people enjoy mapreading - why take a compass bearing if you can see your way home?
So far as I know, the hawks moving into urban areas in both the US and Britain are only doing so either as a result of habitats elsewhere being screwed up (eg by changes in land management), or where they have filled up available wild habitats. So, perversely, if there are enough hawks around for people to notice them colliding with windows, that could be pretty good news. To a peregrine, an office block with associated pigeons is structurally so similar to a sea cliff full of seabirds that going urban makes sense.
Secondly, most birds that conservationists (and yes, we are as scientific and geeky as the average /. er) are really worried about don't live in built-up areas so the impact with glass is likely to be less of a problem.
Thirdly, window stickers (especially those shaped like a hawk) can sharply reduce the level of impacts especially against windows that look like a fly-through to somewhere else.
And finally, when you find a bird that hit a window, someone will say it's broken its neck. Not so. Birds' necks are much longer and more flexible than most people realise until they see a lolling corpse. The commonest cause of death against a window is brain haemorrage.