scholarly journals Improving nomenclatural consistency: a decade of experience in the World Register of Marine Species

Author(s):  
Tammy Horton ◽  
Serge Gofas ◽  
Andreas Kroh ◽  
Gary C.B. Poore ◽  
Geoffrey Read ◽  
...  

The World Register of Marine species (WoRMS) has been established for a decade. The early history of the database involved compilation of existing global and regional species registers. This aggregation, combined with changes to data types and the changing needs of WoRMS users, has resulted in an evolution of data-entry consistency over time. With the task of aggregating the accepted species names for all marine species approaching completion, our focus has shifted to improving the consistency and quality of data held while keeping pace with the addition of > 2000 new marine species described annually. This paper defines priorities and longer-term aims that promote standardisation within and interoperability among biodiversity databases, provides editors with further information on how to input nomenclatural data in a standardised way and clarifies for users of WoRMS how and why names are represented as they are. We 1) explain the categories of names included; 2) list standard reasons used to explain why a name is considered ‘unaccepted’ or ‘uncertain’; 3) present and explain the more difficult situations encountered; 4) describe categories of sources and notes linked to a taxon; and 5) recommend how type material, type locality and environmental information should be entered.

Author(s):  
Georgia Garani ◽  
Nunziato Cassavia ◽  
Ilias K. Savvas

Data warehouse (DW) systems provide the best solution for intelligent data analysis and decision-making. Changes applied to data gradually in real life have to be projected to the DW. Slowly changing dimension (SCD) refers to the potential volatility of DW dimension members. The treatment of SCDs has a significant impact over the quality of data analysis. A new SCD type, Type N, is proposed in this research paper, which encapsulates volatile data into historical clusters. Type N preserves complete history of changes, additional tables, columns, and rows are not required, extra join operations are omitted, and surrogate keys are avoided. Type N is implemented and compared to other SCD types. Good candidates for practicing SCDs are spatiotemporal objects (i.e., objects whose shape or geometry evolves slowly over time). The case study used and implemented in this paper concerns shape-shifting constructions (i.e., buildings that respond to changing weather conditions or the way people use them). The results demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed SCD Type N.


Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (58) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas

ABSTRACTWhat is time? Just like everything else in the world, our understanding of time has changed continually over time. This article tracks this question through the history of Western philosophy and looks at major answers from the likes of Aristotle, Kant, and McTaggart.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-114
Author(s):  
Nicole Vilkner

AbstractIn the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Isaac Nyabisa Oteyo ◽  
Mary Esther Muyoka Toili

AbstractResearchers in bio-sciences are increasingly harnessing technology to improve processes that were traditionally pegged on pen-and-paper and highly manual. The pen-and-paper approach is used mainly to record and capture data from experiment sites. This method is typically slow and prone to errors. Also, bio-science research activities are often undertaken in remote and distributed locations. Timeliness and quality of data collected are essential. The manual method is slow to collect quality data and relay it in a timely manner. Capturing data manually and relaying it in real time is a daunting task. The data collected has to be associated to respective specimens (objects or plants). In this paper, we seek to improve specimen labelling and data collection guided by the following questions; (1) How can data collection in bio-science research be improved? (2) How can specimen labelling be improved in bio-science research activities? We present WebLog, an application that we prototyped to aid researchers generate specimen labels and collect data from experiment sites. We use the application to convert the object (specimen) identifiers into quick response (QR) codes and use them to label the specimens. Once a specimen label is successfully scanned, the application automatically invokes the data entry form. The collected data is immediately sent to the server in electronic form for analysis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stocker

Nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) were an important development in the history of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. From 1957 through 1968, when the Treaty of Tlatelolco was signed, the United States struggled to develop a policy toward NWFZs in response to efforts around the world to create these zones, including in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Many within the U.S. government initially rejected the idea of NWFZs, viewing them as a threat to U.S. nuclear strategy. However, over time, a preponderance of officials came to see the zones as advantageous, at least in certain areas of the world, particularly Latin America. Still, U.S. policy pertaining to this issue remained conservative and reactive, reflecting the generally higher priority given to security policy than to nuclear nonproliferation.


A brief review of the major advances since 1979 in Silurian and Devonian palaeobotany is followed by a preliminary report on a Gedinnian assemblage from the Welsh Borderland. This is dominated by rhyniopsids and includes several species of Cooksonia and Salopella . Spores have been isolated from a number of taxa. The assemblage is used to illustrate the problems of recognition and classification of early vascular plants. Parallel sedimentological and palaeogeographical studies permit speculation on the ecology and life histories of the plants that colonized the Old Red Continent. It is concluded that the lack of well preserved and independently dated assemblages from elsewhere in the world (an exception being the Baragwanathia flora of Australia) prevents the detection of any provincialism in the late Silurian and early Devonian and makes generalizations on the early history of vascular plants premature.


1936 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. H. Hurlston

Abstract The two main classes of vulcanized oil substitute or factice are heat-cured brown factice and cold-cured white factice. They were both introduced into the rubber industry at about the same time (1846–1847), the former variety by Anderson and the latter by Parkes. It has been stated (Twiss, Trans. Inst. Rubber Ind., 7, 234 (1931)) that Parkes first opened a proofing factory at Birmingham but that the business was shortly afterwards absorbed by Chas. Macintosh & Co. and transferred to Manchester. This probably dates the commencement of the use of white factice in proofings. The early history of the development of the use of brown factice on a works scale is more obscure. As the name implies, these vulcanized oils were used in the first place as ingredients which could economically substitute part of the crude rubber content of mixings, but as time went on it became apparent to compounders that these materials possessed intrinsic properties which made them almost indispensable in certain mixings, both for ease of manufacture and for high quality of the resultant article. The utility of factices in the general rubber trade is therefore in many respects analogous to that of reclaimed rubbers.


Author(s):  
Martin Eisner

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas Berkel ◽  
Guus Termeer

The University of Groningen has been an international university since its foundation in 1614. The first professors formed a rich international community, and many students came from outside the Netherlands, especially from areas now belonging to Germany. Internationalization, a popular slogan nowadays, is therefore nothing new, but its meaning has changed over time. How did the University of Groningen grow from a provincial institution established for religious reasons into a top-100 university with 36,000 students, of whom 25% come from abroad and almost half of the academic staff is of foreign descent? What is the identity of this four-century-old university that is still strongly anchored in the northern part of the Netherlands but that also has a mind that is open to the world? The history of the university, as told by Klaas van Berkel and Guus Termeer, ends with a short paragraph on the impact of the corona crisis.


Author(s):  
David N. Dickter ◽  
Daniel C. Robinson

This chapter traces the early history and progress of a pioneering interprofessional practice and education (IPE) program at Western University of Health Sciences (WesternU), whose growth and development can be viewed in the context of the broader IPE field, that of a nascent movement within the United States to recognize and facilitate collaborative, patient-centered healthcare. This chapter provides some of the background and details from the early design years at WesternU. The IPE movement in the U.S. worked with general principles and broad conceptual outcomes such as safety and quality but it took time to delineate more specific guidelines and practices. Over the years, frameworks and standards for education, practice, and outcomes assessment have developed that have helped to guide the program. Similarly, WesternU has developed and refined its education and assessment methods over time.


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