I won't be able to get the Boneyard up and running till I get off work tonight. Which gives YOU till 8pm Eastern US time to get your last minute Boneyard submissions in! Everything will be counted. Remember, you make the difference in blog carnivals by participation! You can also submit articles you liked from blogs other than your own! They don't have to be invert related, we are just an invert blog here! Hurry!
Bug Girl has created a great challenge at Donors Choose, one that should be of interest to all our readers – it's a collection of insect related projects at high poverty schools. A worthy cause for sure.
If you're not familiar with DonorsChoose.org, they describe themselves as "a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund."
She's also asking for suggestions for a wacky reward to all of us once we help fund all the projects on her challenge...go read about her previous wacky adventures, give her some idea for the "reward" and help out some potential future entomologists.
Life Photo Meme
From Courthouse News (via Crooked Timber via Boing Boing):
"Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.I've heard of Zotero before, but it sort of irks me when a large corporation sues their userbase because they were smart enough to figure out their proprietary format on their own. It is not like Cohen and GMU stole company secrets. They reverse engineered the file format. Kudos to them I say! I am downloading Zotero right now and will be testing out that file format conversion feature on my library of 3500+ articles (with pdfs). It actually looks pretty cool! Check out their homepage. This will be a great addition my growing collection of open source software including NeoOffice, Mozilla and R. I'll test it out and post a review after several days. In the meanwhile, why not download and install Zotero for yourself in protest, or at least out of curiosity.
Thomson Reuters also sued the Commonwealth of Virginia, in Richmond City Court. George Mason, founded in 1972, is a state institution.
Reuters says its EndNote Software "allows end users to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images, and .pdfs in any language, and instantly create bibliographic reference style files and figure lists in Thomson's proprietary .ens style format for over 3,500 journals and publications."
The complaint states, "Dr. Daniel J. Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and the director of GMU's Center for History and New media, developed Zotero, which is a freely distributable, open-source software based research tool that allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources, including citations, and freely share the results with others."
The Center for History and New Media release "a new beta version of Zotero to the general public" on July 8. Reuters adds, "A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert - in direct violation of the License Agreement - Thomson's 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files."
It claims GMU reverse engineered Reuters' EndNote software to create Zotero"
"Zotero is a better tool, too. Shared lists, bibliographies, support for clipping from searches, including Google Scholar. Instant saves from browsing.
Time to move, methinks. Let me see, how hard would it be to migrate my 2100+ article database.... "
Next week on Oct. 7 I am set to host the Boneyard blog carnival! The Boneyard is a collection of blog posts on all things palaeo. Lets get lots of palaeo-invert posts!
I need your submissions so dig through your strata and dust off the fossils you have buried under all that other muck. Leave a comment with link here or email me (address over there in the sidebar -->) submissions. Submissions do not have to be from your own blog. You can submit entries you liked that other people wrote too.
You probably saw all the posts about the new species found on and in the Australian reefs from the recent Census of Marine Life efforts there.
The video of Heron Island sampling at the CoML website is a great watch, good invert sampling in the last half of the video.
A second video from New Tang Dynasty Television is available on YouTube which actually does a decent job of reporting on the discoveries, including showing a good photo of the tongue eating isopods (outside of their hosts).
Life Photo Meme
From the WebEcoist:
These deadly insects are naturally designed to kill. The effects of their bites range from painful to deadly for humans, and they inject their prey with lethal salivary secretions that immobilize them and ease ingestion and digestion. These six represent some of the stranger and more interesting assassins of the insect world.
