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March 2011 Archives
If you live in western Connecticut, and you're interested in learning how to identify invasive plant species, Bill Moorehead is leading two 1-day workshops on invasive plant identification. Bill Moorehead is one of the few people who knows almost as much about the flora of southern New England as Les Mehrhoff did. He's an outstanding field botanist. Here's more information from a recent e-mail about the workshops, in case you're interested.
There are still spaces in both workshops. The workshops, a Fairfield County edition and a Litchfield County edition, are taught by me [Bill Moorehead] and co-sponsored by Aton Forest Inc. and Highstead Arboretum; both focus on distinguishing invasive plants from similar native species in the field in late winter/early spring, i.e., in leaf-off condition and/or somewhere between leaf-on and leaf-off. The first now takes place on Friday, Apr 1, 2011, at & near Highstead Arboretum in Redding, CT, and the second Friday, Apr 8, at & near White Memorial Conservation Center, in Litchfield, CT. At both we will see in the field or lab most of the woody invasive plants and similar native species that occur in Connecticut, several other non-native woody species that may come to recognized as invasives in the future, and a number of invasive herbaceous species that are detectable at this time of year. Please consider joining us, and please forward this email to anyone that you know who might be interested in and benefit from these workshops, and please contact me (contact info in the closing) if you have any questions about the workshops.
At least it's not confidential if you work at a public institution in a state, like Wisconsin, with strong freedom of information laws.
As Wisconsin's capital continued to echo with debate over the controversial legislation that strips public unions of collective bargaining rights, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison publicly joined the conversation last week with his first post on a new blog.I am not a lawyer, so I don't know how Connecticut's laws compare to Wisconsin's, but this is what the Office of Audit, Compliance, & Ethics has to say on its information page:
It was a lengthy and speculative examination of a national organization for conservative lawmakers that the professor, William Cronon, believed was partly responsible for what he described as "this explosion of radical conservative legislation." The post soon received more than a half million hits, he said.
Two days later, on March 17, while attending a conference of historians, Professor Cronon learned that a public records request had been filed by a state Republican Party official demanding access to months of messages on his university e-mail account that referred to certain politicized words and names, including the governor and a number of legislators. ("Wisconsin Professor's E-Mails Are Target of G.O.P. Records Request", by A. G. Sulzberger, The New York Times, 26 March 2011)
The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public university. UConn is also considered a State Agency under the executive branch of the State of Connecticut. As a public university and State Agency, UConn is subject to the requirements of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act. This means that any record created or maintained by UConn faculty or staff is presumed to be available to the public, except under very limited circumstances.I think it's safe to conclude that if anyone filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking to see e-mails I'd written, there's a very good chance that the University would have to comply -- unless the request were demonstrably a "fishing expedition" with no particular target or purpose.
I am not a bot.
If I were a bot, you'd see posts a lot more frequently.
Last year, Luca Aiello, a PhD student at the University of Torino, began analysing an online social network dedicated to the discussion of books. He created software, known as a crawler, that mapped the connections within the network. To give the crawler access to the network, Aiello had to create an account for it. To his surprise, users started noticing that the crawler was visiting their pages. They flocked to the crawler's page. It now has over 70 followers and has received over 2,000 messages, says Aiello, making it one of the most popular members of the network. (from New Scientist)
If I were a bot, you'd see posts a lot more frequently.
A little over five years ago the Botanical Society of America launched PlantingScience, an online learning community designed to foster connections between university-based scientists and secondary school students and teachers. In today's issue of Science, Claire Hemmingway, Bill Dahl, Chris Haufler, and Carol Steussy describe the program. Planting Science was chosen as a winner of the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE).
Congratulations to everyone who's been involved in the PlantingScience effort for their hard work and inspiration. Pictured at the left are three BSA staff members who've been particularly involved in making PlantingScience happen (from left to right): Rob Brandt (manager of information technology), Claire Hemingway (director of education), and Bill Dahl (executive director).
Congratulations to everyone who's been involved in the PlantingScience effort for their hard work and inspiration. Pictured at the left are three BSA staff members who've been particularly involved in making PlantingScience happen (from left to right): Rob Brandt (manager of information technology), Claire Hemingway (director of education), and Bill Dahl (executive director).
I understand the need for frugality, and when I travel on the taxpayer's dime (whether the State of Connecticut or the federal government is picking up the tab), I do my best to save money. And I know that folks in our Accounts Payable office are only doing their job, but sometimes it does feel a little like this.
Unfortunately, sometimes it does appear that we need to be monitored. From this morning's Hartford Courant:
I don't know how Chief Hudd's salary was negotiated, and "lunacy" may be too strong a term, but it certainly seems out of whack. And the university doesn't need press like this when we're already facing a big hole in our budget that won't be fixed by an increase in tuition and fees of only 2.5%.
Unfortunately, sometimes it does appear that we need to be monitored. From this morning's Hartford Courant:It's lunacy. for example, to pay the top-ranking police official at UConn, Chief Robert Hudd, almost a quarter of a million dollars a year -- $246,961, to be precise.
...
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who was paid about $212,000 annually as of two years ago, commands a force of 34,000 that protects 8 million residents and countless tourists and office workers.
Providence's police chief makes $168,000. The university police chief at Rutgers' New Brunswick campus, which has 37,000 students, made $121,600 in 2009.
The annual salary of Hartford's police chief, Daryl Roberts, is $156,800. He commands a force of more than 400 officers who protect a city of about 125,000 people plus a daytime employee population.
I don't know how Chief Hudd's salary was negotiated, and "lunacy" may be too strong a term, but it certainly seems out of whack. And the university doesn't need press like this when we're already facing a big hole in our budget that won't be fixed by an increase in tuition and fees of only 2.5%.
Continue reading It does feel like this some times.
Walter Fitch was among the most influential molecular evolutionary biologists of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I learned recently that he passed away. The paragraphs below are from an e-mail sent to biologists at the University of California - Irvine.
Dear Colleagues -
I am sorry to report that a beloved member of our campus community, Dr. Walter Fitch, passed away in his sleep this morning at his home in University Hills. We will miss him dearly as a friend, as a colleague, and as a towering intellectual presence.
Walter was born in San Diego in 1929, and earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958. He was a post-doctoral scholar at both Stanford and University College (London) and held full professorships at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California. He came to UC Irvine in 1989 as a Distinguished Professor and later became the Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Walter was a founding father of the field of molecular evolution, and established methods for constructing phylogenetic trees from amino acid and nucleic acid sequences. He also made contributions to virology, the origin of life, taxonomy, genetics and molecular biology. For his work he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Linnean Society (England). He founded the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and was the editor-in-chief of its journal, Molecular Biology and Evolution for its first 10 years. He contributed mightily not only to the intellectual process but as a mentor to young scientists.
Walter is survived by his beloved wife, his four children and several grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.
Sincerely,
Brandon Gaut
Professor & Chair
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The video above shows an explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. The current guess is that the explosion was caused by a buildup of hydrogen (New York Times 8:20am). It's scary enough that there's been an explosion at a nuclear facility, but this is what's even scarier.
Japan is a country that is lauded for doing preparedness right.Maybe "scary" isn't the right word. Maybe "humbling" is more appropriate. A disaster as large as the 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan yesterday reminds us that no matter how well prepared we are, steel and concrete can only do so much to protect us. Nature will always have the last word.
Japan is a rich, high-tech nation with much rough experience of seismic rumblings: those factors have led it to plan, and plan well, for disaster, with billions spent over the years on developing and deploying technologies to limit the damage from temblors and tsunamis. ("The limits of safeguards and human foresight," by John Schwartz, The New York Times)
There have been five mass extinction events in the history of the earth, the first at the end of the Orodovician (445mya), the second at the end of the Devonian (375mya), the third at the end of the Permian (254mya), the fourth at the end of the Triassic (204mya), and the fifth at the end of the Cretaceous (71mya). It's been commonplace among conservation biologists to refer to current human-caused extinctions as the sixth mass extinction.1It's been clear for a long time that current rates of extinction are much higher than they have been at any time in the recent geological past.2There are many caveats associated with estimates of current rates of extinction, and there are lots of uncertainties, but there's little doubt that extinction rates are much higher now than they were before the rise of modern humans. What hasn't been as clear is whether the scale of the extinction really is as great as that of the mass extinctions of the past -- until now.
Writing in this week's Nature, Anthony Barnosky and colleagues grapple with the data that are available on contemporary extinctions and use a variety of techniques to compare current rates of extinction with the 75% extinction threshold used to define mass extinctions in the fossil record. As you can see, the estimated extinctiion intensities are already verging on that threshold.3
After reviewing all of the evidence this is what the authors conclude:
Even taking into account the difficulties of comparing the fossil and modern records, and applying conservative comparative methods that favour minimizing the differences between fossil and modern extinction metrics, there are clear indications that losing species now in the 'critically endangered' category would propel the world to a state of mass extinction that has previously been seen only five times in about 540 million years. Additional losses of species in the 'endangered' and 'vulnerable' categories could accomplish the sixth mass extinction in just a few centuries. It may be of particular concern that this extinction trajectory would play out under conditions that resemble the 'perfect storm' that coincided with past mass extinctions: multiple, atypical high-intensity ecological stressors, including rapid, unusual climate change and highly elevated atmospheric CO2. The huge difference between where we are now, and where we could easily be within a few generations, reveals the urgency of relieving the pressures that are pushing today's species towards extinction.Yes, Virginia. We are living in the sixth mass extinction in the history of life. And we are responsible for it.
Continue reading The sixth mass extinction.
Next Wednesday, 9 March, the Energy, Resources and Environment program of School of Advanced International Studies (Johns Hopkins University), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and the United Foundations Program are sponsoring a Global Leaders Forum on Growing green in a crowded, carbon-constrained world
The participants are Achim Steiner (Executive Director, UNEP), Kate Gordon (Vice President for Energy Policy, Center for American Progress), and Richenda van Leeuwen (Senior Director of Energy Access, United Nations Foundation). David J. Jihrad (Director of the ERE program at SAIS) will moderate. For more information, download the program announcement (PDF)
This is National Invasive Species Awareness Week -- 28 February through 4 March 2011. There are events all week in Washington, DC. Visit the NISAW website for more information.
And if you can't make it to DC, think about this as an alternative: Eat an invasive species. Eat an invasive species? Sounds strange, doesn't it? Well, the folks at Invasivore.org explain why it makes sense.
Related articles
And if you can't make it to DC, think about this as an alternative: Eat an invasive species. Eat an invasive species? Sounds strange, doesn't it? Well, the folks at Invasivore.org explain why it makes sense.
We hope we can tap into two types of hunger- for food and for knowledge- to provide a two-pronged approach to controlling biological invasions.
The first and most important component of the invasivore response is Awareness. By providing recipes alongside other important information about invasive species, we support Lifestyle Choices and the Political Will to take action against invasive species. In this way, we move from merely responding to invasions under way, towards preventing them.
An informed invasivore will always be on the lookout for new invasions. Invasivores are Citizen Monitors of areas of high invasion risk, often where other invaders are already established, ready to sound the alarm -or dinner bell. Invasivores provide early detection, enabling and providing rapid response.
Eating invasive species may also contribute to controlling the spread and limit the impacts of invasive species through Direct Population Reduction. Overhunting has lead to the extinction or near extinction of many species such as the passenger pigeon or the American bison, so why not invasive species? Unfortunately, the biological traits of invasive species tend to be quite different from those of species previously susceptible to extirpation. Invasive species typically have high growth rates, mature early, have escaped their native enemies and diseases, and have wide dietary breadth and environmental tolerances while the traits of eradicable species are the polar opposite. While direct harvest is the poster child of the invasivore movement, as with all interventions near the end of the invasion process, it is one of the least effective.
Lastly, when we are forced to accept an invasive species, eating them can Reduce the Economic Burden of this adaptation. Harvest and use or sale of an invasive species may at least partially recoup some of the monetary losses suffered from the loss of native biodiversity. Of course, adaptation is the least satisfying option, but perhaps better than nothing.
To these ends, what's really important to us at invasivore.org is to inform and discuss biological invasions in the most palatable manner possible. Our recipes aren't just food; they're also food for thought. Hidden within is a lot of other delicious information on the study of biological invasions. This information is useful in making informed choices to prevent species introductions. So let's learn together and put invasive species in their place- in their native range or on our plates!
Continue reading Eat an invasive species.
What? A Tuesday pen? You're first asking yourself, "Why is Kent writing about pens?" If you know the answer to that, you'll wonder, "Why is this entry appearing on Tuesday instead of Monday?" The answer to both of those questions is the spectacular pen from Graf von Faber-Castell at the left.I received my Early Spring catalog from Fahrneys Pens today, and the Graf von Faber-Castell was on the cover. It took my breath away -- twice. Once because of how astonishingly beautiful it is. Once because of the list price: $3995. I wish I could afford to add it to my collection, but I'll have to satisfy myself with looking at the picture and, maybe, seeing it in the display case the next time I'm in DC.
Here's the catalog description:
For its 250th Jubilee, Graf von Faber-Castell presents perhaps its most beautiful and astonishing Pen of the Year thus far, the 2011 limited edition in sumptuous jade. Extraordinary skill is required to transform the extremely hard gemstone - a fact that has inspired and challenged craftsmen through the ages. The Pen of the Year 2011 uses Russian jade, or nephrite. The emerald-colored stones are delicately mottled; their deep green exhibits unusual shadings. The jade is found in Siberia, but the exact location has always been the dealers' best-kept secret. Even today, the hunt for jade is something of an adventure! Numerous processes are required before the jade can be set into the Pen of the Year. From the first slice of the raw stone to the final polish, the craftsman must recognize the unique nuances that bring out the jade's natural gleam. Only very experienced jewelers can achieve this. Only a genuine artist can master the cuts typical of jade as he chisels out a masterpiece in stone. The jade pieces are set into the platinum-plated, hexagonal barrel to turn each pen into a very special treasure. An elaborately faceted stone on the end of the cap is the pens' crowning glory. The luxurious jade fountain pen has a bicolor 18K gold nib carefully 'run in' by hand. The platinum-plated end cap protects the knob for the piston filling mechanism. Each individually numbered pen comes in an exclusive wood case with a high-gloss, jade green lid. The certificate bears the personal signature of Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, attesting to the limited edition of this jubilee issue, the Pen of the Year 2011. As Faber-Castell was founded in the year 1761, no more than 1,761 of the pens will be produced.
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