{.size-large .wp-image-16741 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16741” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/10/27/brachiosaurus-and-human-metacarpals-compared/brachiosaurus-and-human-metacarpals-compared/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/brachiosaurus-and-human-metacarpals-compared.jpg” orig-size=“2100,2800” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

I don’t know if this exists in the US, but here in Britain it’s common for kids in Year 11 at school (age 15 or 16) to have a week allocated where they find a position (usually unpaid) and do some work outside the school. It’s called “work experience”. A friend of a friend has a son that age, and he wants to be a palaeontologist. I was asked if I had any advice. Here’s what I wrote, lightly edited: I hope it’s useful to other enthusiastic kids.

Many groups are interested in augmenting their affiliation metadata with RORs and it seems that a list of organization names is the right input to that process... Alas, we know that affiliations are a swamp filled with gotcha's. It turns out that an unexpected (really?) number of organization names resolve to multiple RORs. Actually, almost 800 of them!

How we added an auto-updating set of citations to underworld in our publications webpage. We need to curate all the publications that we can find that use the underworld geodynamics code and provide this information on our website. To avoid needless repetition, we take advantage of the fact that nearly all the information we require is online and automatically construct the bibliography from an online public zotero library.

After this year’s SVPCA, Vicki and London and I spent a few days with the Taylor family in the lovely village of Ruardean. It wasn’t all faffing about with the Iguanodon pelvis, the above photo notwithstanding.

Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license. This is a a very well-intentioned licence that allows free use except for commercial purposes, and which imposes the same licence on all derivative works. While that sounds good, there are solid reasons to prefer the simpler CC By licence.

{.size-large .wp-image-16693 .aligncenter attachment-id=“16693” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/10/12/a-nice-pneumatic-allosaurus-cervical/pneumatic-allosaurus-cervical/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/pneumatic-allosaurus-cervical.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1500” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

{.size-large .wp-image-16680 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16680” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/10/07/parasaurolophus-sculpture-by-brian-engh/parasaurolophus-sculpture-by-brian-engh-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/parasaurolophus-sculpture-by-brian-engh-1.jpg” orig-size=“1800,1350” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

Clear and specific community recommendations for FAIR metadata in multiple dialects are rare and necessary for measuring progress towards evaluating and improving metadata in many repositories. We propose an initial set of concepts and an evaluation of the DataCite metadata collection for essential metadata elements that support Findability.

Regular readers will remember that we followed up our 1VPC talk about what it means for a vertebra to be horizontal by writing it up as a paper, and doing it in the open.