The road to complete and consistent metadata can be long and arduous – digging through piles of metadata and other kinds of data to find small gems of information that can be added to metadata records, contacting recalcitrant researchers to fill in blanks, slowly building content across a collection… Does it really need to be that hard?
Looking for New Year’s metadata resolutions? How about: Stop using sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” without specifying a use case. Sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” come up frequently in metadata discussions, usually in the context of what a data provider wants to provide or, even more common, in the context of what should be expected of them.
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On 22nd December 2020, I gave this talk (via Zoom) to Martin Sander’s palaeontology research group at the University of Bonn, Germany. And now I am giving it to you , dear reader, the greatest Christmas present anyone could ever wish for: It’s based on a 2013 paper written with Matt Wedel, which itself goes back through many years slow gestation, originating in a discussion on a car journey in 2008.
Research in the Earth Science faces an extremely uncertain future in Australian Universities. The financial shock of 2020 has turned into an existential crisis for Earth Science departments across the country.
These things just catch my eye, I can’t help it. Note that the corkscrew features a distinct medially directed femoral head, the bulge in the lateral margin of the proximal portion that is characteristic of titanosaurs, and a straight shaft.
Darren has written a brief review of TetZooMCon, the online event that replaced the now traditional annual conference of Tetrapod Zoology.
The earth system provides many crucial services essential to the wealth and health of human society. It provides both the climate and the platform on which we live, the mineral, energy and groundwater resources on which we depend and increasingly a repository for our wastes.
As the children of the plate tectonic revolution, today’s geoscientists have grown up with a zeal to understand the basic workings of our planet. There are many remarkable testimonies to the success of plate tectonics including declining discovery rates of large mineral resources.
I’m late to this party, but I want to say a few things about the recently announced €9,500 article-processing charge (APC) that Nature has introduced to make itself Plan-S compliant. The first thing is that a lot of people are quite understandably outraged by this very large fee.