ComTax: community-driven curation for taxonomic databases

This poster presents the work of the ComTax project to develop a community-driven curation process among practicing scientists and citizen scientists. The project provides tools to help scientists identify and validate appropriate taxonomic names from the scanned historical literature. The system operates on scanned documents, typically taken from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, although documents sourced from other repositories could be used. The system is intended to be used on uncorrected text after optical character recognition (OCR) on the scanned images. The key stages are: 1. Identify possible taxonomic names in the scanned text using machine learning techniques. 2. Verify the extracted names against existing databases. If present, the source scanned text can be automatically marked-up with the name. 3. Unverified names might mean they are not currently recorded in the verification databases, typically because the old name in the literature has been reclassified, or because erroneous OCR means that the name is incorrectly transcribed in the scanned text. In either case: 3.1. Present the proposed name to domain experts or citizen scientists for validation or correction, potentially through a voting mechanism to collect expert judgments on the putative taxonomic name. 3.2. Mark-up the scanned text with the corrected spelling of the name and offer validated taxonomic names for further use by the community. This poster will describe the technical challenges facing the ComTax project, and highlight potential extensions of the work to the curation of other entities of interest in the legacy literature or of different disciplines

LIVESTOCK PROJECTIONS BY THE TECHNIQUE OF FLOW CHARTS

Livestock Production/Industries,

Fish Foods in Relation to Fish Culture

The necessity for a solution to the fish culture problem was long ago felt in the crowded districts of Europe. The economic demand that food be produced for the ever increasing population of these districts resulted in directing attention to the comparatively waste small inland ponds and lakes, once plentifully inhabited by food fish but now almost completely exhausted. It was to meet this situation, then, that the pioneer fish culturists began working at methods to raise the waste waters to their former degree of productive usefulness in yielding food

Vascular Structure of the Kidney in the Snapping and Painted Turtles

This paper deals with the vascularization of the kidney in Chrysemys marginata belli (Gray) and Chelydra serpentina. The arrangement of the vessels in the kidney of the painted turtle produces a true renal portal system while that in the kidney of the snapping turtle permits a considerable amount of blood to shunt around the capillaries of the kidney

Galileo In-Situ Dust Measurements in Jupiter's Gossamer Rings

During its late orbital mission at Jupiter the Galileo spacecraft made two passages through the giant planet's gossamer ring system. The impact-ionization dust detector on board successfully recorded dust impacts during both ring passages and provided the first in-situ measurements from a dusty planetary ring. In all, a few thousand dust impacts were counted with the instrument accumulators during both ring passages, but only a total of 110 complete data sets of dust impacts were transmitted to Earth. Detected particle sizes range from about 0.2 to 5 micron, extending the known size distribution by an order of magnitude towards smaller particles than previously derived from optical imaging (Showalter et al. 2008). The grain size distribution increases towards smaller particles and shows an excess of these tiny motes in the Amalthea gossamer ring compared to the Thebe ring. The size distribution for the Amalthea ring derived from our in-situ measurements for the small grains agrees very well with the one obtained from images for large grains. Our analysis shows that particles contributing most to the optical cross-section are about 5 micron in radius, in agreement with imaging results. The measurements indicate a large drop in particle flux immediately interior to Thebe's orbit and some detected particles seem to be on highly-tilted orbits with inclinations up to 20 deg.Comment: 13 figures, 4 tables, submitted to Icaru

Possible Indication of Narrow Baryonic Resonances Produced in the 1720-1790 MeV Mass Region

Signals of two narrow structures at M=1747 MeV and 1772 MeV were observed in the invariant masses M_{pX} and M_{\pi^{+}X} of the pp->ppX and pp->p\pi^{+}X reactions respectively. Many tests were made to see if these structures could have been produced by experimental artefacts. Their small widths and the stability of the extracted masses lead us to conclude that these structures are genuine and may correspond to new exotic baryons. Several attempts to identify them, including the possible "missing baryons" approach, are discussed.Comment: 17 pages including 8 figures and 3 tables. ReVte

Frequency of occurrence of numbers in the World Wide Web

The distribution of numbers in human documents is determined by a variety of diverse natural and human factors, whose relative significance can be evaluated by studying the numbers' frequency of occurrence. Although it has been studied since the 1880's, this subject remains poorly understood. Here, we obtain the detailed statistics of numbers in the World Wide Web, finding that their distribution is a heavy-tailed dependence which splits in a set of power-law ones. In particular, we find that the frequency of numbers associated to western calendar years shows an uneven behavior: 2004 represents a `singular critical' point, appearing with a strikingly high frequency; as we move away from it, the decreasing frequency allows us to compare the amounts of existing information on the past and on the future. Moreover, while powers of ten occur extremely often, allowing us to obtain statistics up to the huge 10^127, `non-round' numbers occur in a much more limited range, the variations of their frequencies being dramatically different from standard statistical fluctuations. These findings provide a view of the array of numbers used by humans as a highly non-equilibrium and inhomogeneous system, and shed a new light on an issue that, once fully investigated, could lead to a better understanding of many sociological and psychological phenomena.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Literature-driven Curation for Taxonomic Name Databases

Digitized biodiversity literature provides a wealth of content for using biodiversity knowledge by machines. However, identifying taxonomic names and the associated semantic metadata is a difficult and labour intensive process. We present a system to support human assisted creation of semantic metadata. Information extraction techniques auto-matically identify taxonomic names from scanned documents. They are then presented to users for manual correction or verification. The tools that support the curation process include taxonomic name identification and mapping, and community-driven taxonomic name verification. Our research shows the potential for these information extrac-tion techniques to support research and curation in disciplines dependent upon scanned document

Transcriptome Analysis of Targeted Mouse Mutations Reveals the Topography of Local Changes in Gene Expression.

The unintended consequences of gene targeting in mouse models have not been thoroughly studied and a more systematic analysis is needed to understand the frequency and characteristics of off-target effects. Using RNA-seq, we evaluated targeted and neighboring gene expression in tissues from 44 homozygous mutants compared with C57BL/6N control mice. Two allele types were evaluated: 15 targeted trap mutations (TRAP); and 29 deletion alleles (DEL), usually a deletion between the translational start and the 3' UTR. Both targeting strategies insert a bacterial beta-galactosidase reporter (LacZ) and a neomycin resistance selection cassette. Evaluating transcription of genes in +/- 500 kb of flanking DNA around the targeted gene, we found up-regulated genes more frequently around DEL compared with TRAP alleles, however the frequency of alleles with local down-regulated genes flanking DEL and TRAP targets was similar. Down-regulated genes around both DEL and TRAP targets were found at a higher frequency than expected from a genome-wide survey. However, only around DEL targets were up-regulated genes found with a significantly higher frequency compared with genome-wide sampling. Transcriptome analysis confirms targeting in 97% of DEL alleles, but in only 47% of TRAP alleles probably due to non-functional splice variants, and some splicing around the gene trap. Local effects on gene expression are likely due to a number of factors including compensatory regulation, loss or disruption of intragenic regulatory elements, the exogenous promoter in the neo selection cassette, removal of insulating DNA in the DEL mutants, and local silencing due to disruption of normal chromatin organization or presence of exogenous DNA. An understanding of local position effects is important for understanding and interpreting any phenotype attributed to targeted gene mutations, or to spontaneous indels