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Encyclopedia of Life up, but empty

A tip from Canis sent me to the Encyclopedia of Life, which came online last week. I posted on this project about nine months ago. I was skeptical that it would amount to much back then, so I was curious to see if I had missed the mark (as usual). I typed in a bunch of species and found nothing but placeholders for them. The site is still an empty shell, about 99.999 percent short of its goal. They have the categories in place, ready for armies of professional, hand-selected curators with nothing better to do than volunteer their free time to fill in the information.

Yes, I'm still skeptical. The whole idea behind Wikipedia is bottom-up data acquisition. In a sense, it is analogous to a free market: iterative and imperfect, but productive and useful. If every article in Wikipedia had to pass muster from an appointed expert on each subject, there would be no Wikipedia. The EOL will never see the success of Wikipedia with its present top-down, command-and-control structure.

U.N. says: Don’t iron your jeans

Um, wow. So this is what the United Nations Environment Programme is up to these days:

Gore at TED

Bruno Giussani supplies a detailed rundown of Al Gore’s talk at this year’s TED conference. See also Kim Zetter in Wired.

Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, on Stephen Colbert

I don’t think she says 10 words through this whole thing:

Appeals court rules against Navy in sonar case

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld many restrictions on the Navy’s use of mid-frequency sonar off the coast of Southern California, reinforcing a lower court ruling from last month. President Bush had tried to exempt the Navy from the relevant environmental laws in January, but the appeals court agreed with an earlier ruling that […]

Propaganda soft-pedals sonar impacts on marine mammals

The following is a guest post from a friend of mine, Michael Stocker, director of Ocean Conservation Research. —– When it comes to national security interests, I can accept a little obfuscation by our military. But with the recent U.S. Navy press activities on the effects of active sonar on marine life, they are puttin’ […]

Tracking whaling ships and whale sharks

Anti-whaling activists planted tracking devices on Japanese whaling ships as part of a campaign to disrupt the annual hunt, and the Australian customs ship that had been monitoring the hunt returned to port with photographs and video to use for future legal action ...

... a study showed that commercial fishing forced fish to evolve into meeker, less active creatures that carry fewer eggs. Bolder and more adventuresome fish were more likely to be caught by gillnets ...

... the butterflyfish, a common resident of coral reefs, was in danger of extinction because it could only eat one species of coral, Acropora hyacinthus, which is highly vulnerable ...

Friday music blogging: Medeski Martin & Wood

There are few bands with which I have a longer ongoing relationship than jazz-funk-improv trio Medeski Martin & Wood. I think I’m one of the few people that started listening to them when their first album came out — Notes from the Underground, way back in 1991, when I was [gulp] a sophomore in college. […]

Large area proposed as critical habitat for Canada lynx

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed that 42,753 square miles of the northern U.S. be designated as critical habitat for the Canada lynx. The new area is more than 20 times bigger than a proposal made in 2006, which the agency promised to revisit after it became clear that former USFWS overseer Julie […]

When the world gives you an extra day, use it to celebrate amphibian conservation

Leaping long-toed salamanders, Batman! We need your help to save the nearly 2,000 amphibian species that are currently threatened with extinction. That’s one-third of all known species of frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, and caecilians across the globe. And the status of the other two-thirds ain’t looking so hot either. Small wonder, too, what with an […]