Two recent reports from the Census of Marine Life have drawn
worldwide attention.
The All Birds Barcoding Initiative’s inaugural workshop will be held at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University on September 8-9, 2005. Mark Stoeckle has prepared an illustrated brochure describing the needs and resources for this exciting new initiative, which will be one of the first large-scale explorations of the fine structure of genomic biodiversity.
Aware of our long-standing interest in science & diplomacy and belief that science effectively bridges peoples, Harvard physics professor Richard Wilson contacted us in December 2003 about helping U. of Baghdad faculty in science & engineering to visit the USA. We were pleased to help make possible the visit, which finally began 25 June 2005 and earned a front-page story in the Boston Globe 1 July.
The conference, held on 10 Feb 2005, brought together over 200 participants from a wide range of disciplines. The Natural History Museum has this news item regarding the event.
Out of this conference comes three new initiatives: one to count all birds in the world, one to count all fishes in the world (Fish-BOL), and one to count all plant life in Costa Rica. The Fish-BOL group held a workshop in Guelph on 5 June 2005 (see the progam)
We posted two of our older papers, Rails and Snails and the Debate over Goals for Science and Graphical Representations of World Population Growth
We posted the source code for our Loglet Lab 2.0 application. This will allow interested users to continue development, by adding new fit models and visualizations.
The recently completed Census of Marine Life expedition reports lifeless conditions on the seafloor above the tsunami epicenter in a 31 May press release.
An American high school teacher is blogging the Census of Marine Life cruise now underway to explore the seafloor at the Tsunami epicenter:
Adoption of alarming forecasts of nitrogen fertilizer use characterizes many articles and reports, and serves their authors. Nature magazine declined to print our correspondence on its publication of three unconvincing instances of use of high nitrogen forecasts. It is a good bet the growing international nitrogen research industry will feed itself.
We post “Foresters and DNA“, a version of the forthcoming paper by Ausubel, Wernick, and Waggoner based on Jesse’s Keynote address to the Duke U. Forest Genomics conference in November 2004.