scholarly journals Mobilizing Data from Taxonomic Literature for an Iconic Species (Dinosauria, Theropoda, Tyrannosaurus rex)

Author(s):  
Jeremy Miller ◽  
Yanell Braumuller ◽  
Puneet Kishor ◽  
David Shorthouse ◽  
Mariya Dimitrova ◽  
...  

A vast amount of biodiversity data is reported in the primary taxonomic literature. In the past, we have demonstrated the use of semantic enhancement to extract data from taxonomic literature and make it available to a network of databases (Miller et al. 2015). For technical reasons, semantic enhancement of taxonomic literature is most efficient when customized according to the format of a particular journal. This journal-based approach captures and disseminates data on whatever taxa happen to be published therein. But if we want to extract all treatments on a particular taxon of interest, these are likely to be spread across multiple journals. Fortunately, the GoldenGATE Imagine document editor (Sautter 2019) is flexible enough to parse most taxonomic literature. Tyrannosaurus rex is an iconic dinosaur with broad public appeal, as well as the subject of more than a century of scholarship. The Naturalis Biodiversity Center recently acquired a specimen that has become a major attraction in the public exhibit space. For most species on earth, the primary taxonomic literature contains nearly everything that is known about it. Every described species on earth is the subject of one or more taxonomic treatments. A taxon-based approach to semantic enhancement can mobilize all this knowledge using the network of databases and resources that comprise the modern biodiversity informatics infrastructure. When a particular species is of special interest, a taxon-based approach to semantic enhancement can be a powerful tool for scholarship and communication. In light of this, we resolved to semantically enhance all taxonomic treatments on T. rex. Our objective was to make these treatments and associated data available for the broad range of stakeholders who might have an interest in this animal, including professional paleontologists, the curious public, and museum exhibits and public communications personnel. Among the routine parsing and data sharing activities in the Plazi workflow (Agosti and Egloff 2009), taxonomic treatments, as well as cited figures, are deposited in the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), and occurrence records are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Treatment citations were enhanced with hyperlinks to the cited treatment on TreatmentBank, and specimen citations were linked to their entries on public facing collections databases. We used the OpenBiodiv biodiversity knowledge graph (Senderov et al. 2017) to discover other taxa mentioned together with T. rex, and to create a timeline of T. rex research to evaluate the impact of individual researchers and specimen repositories to T. rex research. We contributed treatment links to WikiData, and queried WikiData to discover identifiers to different platforms holding data about T. rex. We used bloodhound-tracker.net to disambiguate human agents, like collectors, identifiers, and authors. We evaluate the adequacy of the fields currently available to extract data from taxonomic treatments, and make recommendations for future standards.

Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Cristina Lazzeroni ◽  
Sandra Malvezzi ◽  
Andrea Quadri

The rapid changes in science and technology witnessed in recent decades have significantly contributed to the arousal of the awareness by decision-makers and the public as a whole of the need to strengthen the connection between outreach activities of universities and research institutes and the activities of educational institutions, with a central role played by schools. While the relevance of the problem is nowadays unquestioned, no unique and fully satisfactory solution has been identified. In the present paper we would like to contribute to the discussion on the subject by reporting on an ongoing project aimed to teach Particle Physics in primary schools. We will start from the past and currently planned activities in this project in order to establish a broader framework to describe the conditions for the fruitful interplay between researchers and teachers. We will also emphasize some aspects related to the dissemination of outreach materials by research institutions, in order to promote the access and distribution of scientific information in a way suited to the different age of the target students.


1987 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marleen Pugach ◽  
Mara Sapon-Shevin

The calls for educational reform that have dominated the professional and lay literature for the past few years have been decidedly silent in discussing the role of special education either as a contributor or a solution to the problems being raised. As an introduction to this “Special Focus” on the relationship between general educational reform and special education, this article summarizes some of the more prominent reports with regard to their treatment (and nontreatment) of special education. The impact of proposed reforms for the conceptualization and operation of special education is the subject of the five articles that follow.


1967 ◽  
Vol 71 (677) ◽  
pp. 344-348
Author(s):  
J. V. Connolly

During the past two years, there has been a sharp acceleration to the interest which industry has displayed in the subject of management education. This can be attributed to these factors: —(a) A more widespread realisation of the gap developing between the UK and a number of foreign economies, as manifested by diverging rates of the major economic indicators.(b) The attainment of top-management responsibilities by a younger generation of managers, many of whom had been given some earlier training and who were more conscious of its value than the incumbents of the job from earlier generations.(c) The publication of the Franks, Robbins and (in the aerospace industry) the Plowden reports.(d) The impact of the Industrial Training Boards making it manifest, in terms of serious levies, that training was an economic necessity and therefore must be investigated thoroughly.Notwithstanding the widespread awakening of interest, it is very belated and sets numerous problems. The problems are in two areas—scale and quality.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rosina Hickman

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences?  Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Śledziewska ◽  
Renata Włoch

In this article we focus on identifying the specificity of digital transformation within the public sector. The aim of the article is to present the main mechanisms resulting from the introduction of digital innovations that have changed the functioning of the public sector. Starting from a discussion on the technological requirements of digital transformation, we briefly characterise the use of computers and the Internet in public administration, resulting in the development of e-services and administration. The main part of the article is devoted to discussing the specificity of the implementation of the new digital technologies in public administration, focusing mainly on artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. Our thesis is that the impact of innovative digital technologies on the operation standards and structure of public administration should be analysed through the prism of interrelated mechanisms of datafication and platformisation, characteristic for the digital economy. The adopted methodology, which is based on an analysis of the subject literature and an analysis of new technology implementations in public administration in EU countries, indicates the pilot, random and non-transformational nature of these implementations, partly due to the lack of well-established methodologies to study and assess the maturity of digital transformation within the public sector.


2019 ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.


2018 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 01001
Author(s):  
Asrif Omar Che Yusoff

Inequality has been a long standing issue in Malaysia, although the situation has been statistically improving over the past 40 years. From a Gini coefficient of 0.51 in 1970, the government has done considerably well to bring the figure down to 0.39 in 2016. Efforts toward improving the situation are aplenty, but there is room for improvement in terms of the coordination and collaboration of initiatives that are carried out within the public, private, and social sectors. This paper explores the idea of corporate social intrapreneurship as a potential vehicle to mitigate inequality in the country for the long term. Through the analysis of existing literatures and data on the subject, the aim is to first of all, provide a historical and global context on how the roles of corporation have evolved over the years, discuss the transformative views on social intrapreneurship against traditional corporate social responsibility, and offer considerations to further corporate social intrapreneurship initiatives through public-private partnerships in Malaysia.


Author(s):  
Alexander Hudson

Over the past three decades, participatory methods of constitution making have gained increasing acceptance and are now an indispensable part of any constitution-making process. Despite this, we know little about how much public participation actually affects the constitution. This article investigates the impact of participation in two groundbreaking cases: Brazil (1988) and South Africa (1996). This analysis demonstrates that public participation has relatively small effects on the text, but that it varies in systematic ways. The theory advanced here posits that party strength (especially in terms of discipline and programmatic commitments) is the key determinant of the effectiveness of public participation. Strong parties may be more effective in many ways, but they are less likely to act on input from the public in constitution-making processes.


2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-110
Author(s):  
Súsanna Margrét Gestsdóttir

In this article the author discusses the teaching of history in Iceland, first and foremost in relation to the environment in which the subject finds itself, the legislation relating to it and the curriculum. Curriculum development over the past decades is examined, in addition to changes in teaching material and the general attitudes that have influenced both of these from the time of the struggle for national independence in the former half of the twentieth century. There is a discussion of the disputes that have arisen as a result of tampering with the curriculum and teaching material in history in recent years, both when new emphases were introduced in the eighties and when history teaching in upper secondary schools was substantially reduced with the new curriculum in 1999. Considerable attention is given to history teaching in upper secondary schools, despite there being a dearth of research at this level. There is quite a degree of evidence that history is popular amongst Icelandic students and the public at large. In this article, an attempt is made to analyse the state of history as a school subject in Iceland, not least in the light of the extensive freedom enjoyed by teachers in their jobs, bearing in mind that there are no standardized exams in the subject and no supervision of teaching methods. At present there is a review of the curricula at all school levels in Iceland and the future of history as a subject is therefore rather uncertain.


2009 ◽  
Vol 199 ◽  
pp. 585-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenran Jiang

AbstractChina's rapidly expanding role in Africa as an energy and resource extractor reveals much of the dynamics and complexities of its growing ties with the continent. Rather than studying the subject in the framework of bilateral interactions, as most existing literature does, this article explores the impact of China's domestic development process on the behaviour of Chinese foreign policy and business operations in Africa. Based on the author's extensive field research in Africa and China, the article argues that much of what the Chinese government, Chinese companies and individual entrepreneurs are doing today in Africa is an externalization of China's own modernization experiences in the past three decades. China's interactions with African countries are reflective of its own development contradictions, and major patterns of Chinese behavour in Africa can be attributed to complex motivations and objectives of the actors involved.


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