[Taxacom] Expressing synonymy as a schematic

Tue May 22 22:39:55 CDT 2012

Hi Stephen,        Back in the day (1980), I was trying to get funding ($25.000-$30,000 per year) to begin a 30-year project to produce a comprehensive, computerized, list of families in the early years (and then genera thereafter) of all biota on Earth.  The goal was to have everything down to generic level by 2010.  That would have been 30 years work for less than a total of one million dollars, but neither government nor private foundations gave me anything more than form letters of rejection.  By that time, I had already done it on my own time for all mammals (all the way down to subspecies level), so I knew it could be done given enough time and very minimal governmental support, but it seems to me that the U.S. government in particular has never been particularly good at looking at a good deal in either the short term or the long term.  They seem more intent on short term thinking that usually ends up pouring FAR larger sums down relative "rat holes" which often have yielded relatively little. Perhaps a reflection of their Congressional political overlords.                              I finally gave up even wasting postage writing NSF and other governmental agencies by the early-to-mid 1990s.  I had been willing to do a lot of work for a very modest salary (no doubt less than the paper pushers I was trying to reason with). Instead we ended up getting multiple projects which cost far more, and even the later Tree of Life is now terribly out of date in spite of far, far larger amounts of funding.  Governmental bureaucrats and their supervisors are either hamstrung by their superiors or just incapable of seeing an extremely good deal when it was staring them in the face. I wanted to do it slowly but surely over 30 years with even minimal funding (perhaps far faster if I had more than $30,000 per year).  It was probably a missed opportunity on several levels, but typical of the short-sighted thinking that seems to have ruled Washington for decades.  It seems to have only gotten worse in the past ten years.  No wonder we are now talking waste in the billions of dollars, and a Congress which does little more than spew out political sound-bites and can get almost nothing done whether it is an election year or not.  I give up on them, and not surprised that the Occupy Movement is so infuriated with them and their political sponsors.  Anyway, the funding I wanted for 30 years of work probably wouldn't even buy many single paintings at auction these days, or perhaps even a Babe Ruth baseball uniform.  But sports has long had easier access to funding, and even an elephant splashing paint on a canvas can generate more income than a lot of harind working people.      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 18:37:02 -0700
> From: stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz
> To: Tony.Rees at csiro.au; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Expressing synonymy as a schematic
> 
> just wondering how long it would take to do that for *all species* (an order of magnitude of millennia would be fine!), and whether all of it is important to know? At the end of the day, information has to be prioritised, and it would certainly be nice to get an error free and truly comprehensive list even of just genera of all biota, but we don't even have that yet ...
>  
> Stephen
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: "Tony.Rees at csiro.au" <Tony.Rees at csiro.au>
> To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
> Sent: Wednesday, 23 May 2012 12:27 PM
> Subject: [Taxacom] Expressing synonymy as a schematic
> 
> Dear Taxacomers,
> 
> Searching for information on a particular taxon name on the web, I happened upon a nice schematic which I thought well expressed the complex taxonomic and nomenclatural history for a species of nematode, Panagrellus redivivus, on p.23 (Figure 2) of the following paper by Ferris, 2009:
> 
> http://plpnemweb.ucdavis.edu/nemaplex/FerrisPublications/pdf%20files/165Ferris2009.pdf
> 
> (a taxon which has moved through 8 genera and 21 treatments, under a variety of epithets, at last count according to this diagram).
> 
> I was thinking that this is a particularly neat method for expressing such changes through time but was also wondering if readers have other suggestions or examples as well.
> 
> Regards - Tony
> 
> Tony Rees
> Manager, Divisional Data Centre,
> CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research,
> GPO Box 1538,
> Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
> Ph: 0362 325318 (Int: +61 362 325318)
> Fax: 0362 325000 (Int: +61 362 325000)
> e-mail: Tony.Rees at csiro.au
> Manager, OBIS Australia regional node, http://www.obis.org.au/
> Biodiversity informatics research activities: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/biodiversity.htm
> Personal info: http://www.fishbase.org/collaborators/collaboratorsummary.cfm?id66
> LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tony-rees/18/770/36
> 
> 
> 
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