“‘Expect to see smart phones accounting for a growing proportion of the wider mobile phone market as they become increasingly affordable to more customers,’ said Canalys Senior Analyst, Pete Cunningham. ‘By 2013, smart phones will grow to represent over 27% of shipments worldwide, with the proportion in some developed markets in Western Europe surpassing 60% and 48% in North America.’”

from here suggests yes.

So if people replace their phones every couple of years by 2015 we could see 50% of people having one in their pocket or bag. That is either a long way off and only half the population or it is really quick and the majority of people. It depends which way you look at it.

The slides are pretty self explanatory. The rules of nomenclature applied by some studious nomenclaturists lead to a change in the official name of a protected rodent. A name that has been stable for years. Who does this name change help? What purpose does it serve outside of playing the nomenclatural game?

Your comments are most welcome -especially if you are rodent specialist.

The process of creating a classification of life is split into two parts. Firstly experts decide which species exist. This process is called taxonomy. Secondly the experts work out what to call the species they recognise. This is called nomenclature.

The relationship between taxonomy and nomenclature is complex. The same species may have been discovered and named more than once by different people. A single species may be found to contain more than one cryptic species. Changes in our understanding of the relationships of species can also result in changes of the names – even if the species themselves do not change.

Nomenclature is governed by a set of rules. For animals these rules are given in the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature code (ICZN) for plants and fungi they are given by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN). Because the naming of a species is only a matter of applying the rules in these codes (and not a matter of judgement or scientific opinion) nomenclature is objective and could even be automated.

Taxonomy reflects current scientific opinion. Two experts may disagree about whether populations represent separate species or how species should be classified. As our knowledge of biodiversity increases classifications may change reflecting changing opinions through time. Taxonomy is therefore subjective.

Because nomenclature is objective it should be straightforward to build a database of all the published names of organisms along with where they were published and what their voucher specimens are but without any indication as to whether they are the currently accepted names of species. This would make it very easy for scientists to work out the correct name for a species when they define it. Such databases of purely nomenclatural information are called nomenclators. Attempts have been made to build nomenclators for each of the nomenclatural codes. Examples include the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) which attempts to list all names of vascular plants, Index Fungorum to list names of fungi and ZooBank names of animals.

PESI is a taxonomic resource. It is an annotated checklist of European organisms that reflects current scientific opinion. As with other scholarly taxonomic works PESI contains much nomenclatural information for organisms and so is also a valuable source of purely nomenclatural information.
Because no nomenclator is yet complete and there is no single point of contact for all scientific names (plants and animals) there is an initiative to build a Global Names Architecture (GNA) that will unify all these efforts. There are further aspirations to produce a Global Names Usage Bank (GNUB) that will include a register of taxonomic opinion on these names.

PESI therefore has a two way relationship with nomenclators. It uses them as sources for correct nomenclature and it can also provide nomenclatural data for inclusion in them where there are gaps. Going forward PESI will be a part of both the GNA and the GNUB both by contributing data and by benefiting from the contributions of others.

My experiences from meditation have lead me to believe that a secular form of mindfulness practice would be of great benefit to many people in the wider community. I believe, for example, that basic mindfulness classes in high school or as a general preventative treatment may improve many peoples lives.

As a scientist and advocate of a secular society I understand that beliefs based on individual experience alone are not enough to inform policy in education and medicine but that validating the efficacy of mindfulness practices is exceedingly challenging. Indeed even developing testable hypotheses is challenging when the result of such interventions may be an overall change in the quality of experience. This is an appealing research area.

I am excited by the masters courses at Bangor as they appear to offer a way for me to ’square the circle’ of my personal mindfulness practice and the more analytical approach to life that comes out of my professional work.

I hope to blog about my experiences on the course as they unfold.

The Frog in the Pond

Sometimes two things cross your desk at the same time and they say more than either one of them would on their own.

Firstly I was looking for a list of British birds and happened across the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) list of bird names and how they have changed between 1923 and 2007. This is most delightful list as it shows the English names are as stable as the scientific names – or both are equally unstable. If it hadn’t been for an attempt to standardise the use of the hyphen the English names would have been much more stable in my opinion (though by no means totally static). Here is a quote:

English vernacular and international use names have proved more stable than scientific names in recent years (see the changes to the scientific names of terns hirundines and tits in Sangster et al , 2005, Ibis 1 47: 821-826 – this paper alone contained 15 changes to the 29 scientific names of species across these three groups, with no changes to any of the 29 English names) and will probably continue to be more stable as ongoing taxonomic research is more likely to see changes to scientific names than it is to English names.

It is easy to see why the BOU should rate English names equally with scientific names. It is also interesting to see that there is no consideration of splitting or merging of taxa here. They are only looking at the names they call (presumably indisputably stable) entities. They map names to names.

The second thing to cross my desk was the publication of a David Hawksworth’s  Terms Used In Bionomenclature. This is a very useful book indeed for those trying to get to grips with the different codes of nomenclature and how they have been applied. Here’s the quote:

This is a glossary of over 2,100 terms used in biological nomenclature – the naming of whole organisms of all kinds. It covers terms in use in the current editions of the different internationally mandated and proposed organismal Codes; i.e. those for botany (including mycology), cultivated plants, prokaryotes (archaea and bacteria), virology, and zoology, as well as the Draft BioCode and PhyloCode.

At over two thousand words this is quite some vocabulary of technical terms. To get a handle on how expressive this is compare it with Basic English which has under a thousand words. This quote from the Wikipedia page:

The 850 core words of Basic English are found in Wiktionary’s Appendix:Basic English word list. This core is theoretically enough for everyday life. However, Ogden prescribed that any student should learn an additional 150 word list for everyday work in some particular field, by adding a word list of 100 words particularly useful in a general field (e.g., science, verse, business, etc.), along with a 50-word list from a more specialised subset of that general field, to make a basic 1000 word vocabulary for everyday work and life.

So you can get by in everyday work and life with 1000 words but a specialist vocabulary twice the size is needed for a system of scientific nomenclature which fails to produce stable names for everyday objects (British birds).

Last time I visited my mother-in-law she asked me what I did for a living and, for the umpteenth time, I tried to explain. I am finding it becomes harder to justify these things even to myself. Nomenclature seems to be a kind of Glass Bead Game only loosely connected to the real world. The real action is probably in barcoding and metagenomics.

This will be of interest to those involved in taxonomic and nomenclature projects as it shows our collective attempts to get to grips with GUIDs and RDF probably in a more political than technical sense. It advocates the use of Darwin Core Archive format as proposed by the GBIF ECAT project.

If you are suffering from a bitter aftertaste then you have my sympathies. Don’t worry about it though it will go away in a few days and you could probably do with eating a little less anyhow. I am sure there is a correlation between people with internet access and those who consume too many calories – I could certainly do with eating just a little less. If the taste does not go away  you should talk to a doctor.

My hunch this is caused by spoilage of the pine nuts but their is an outside chance it is caused by a particular variety or species of Pinus.There is no need to stop eating pine nuts in the future. There is also no need to come over all xenophobic about the origins of the nuts. Not wishing to be xenophobic myself it does appear as though all the xenophobes live in one country

Chadwicks and Nicklins in the Same 1906 Photograph

These are some of my blood relations in 1906. The two guys on the right hand end of the second row down are Chadwicks and the first guy on the front row is a Nicklin.