Category: Featured

Elizabeth synthesizes!

yes scientists do use social network tools like the common of human being! It is not incompatible with using books, inventories and databases. < … snip … >
I would suggest tagging this discussion with few keywords (perhaps using an automatic ‘tagger’ ), e.g. the name of the varieties involved in the pedigrees and trait names so we could link this discussion to a web site, to the content of a scientific or bibliographic database or a photos repository, etc.

Good thinking. We probably don’t make nearly enough use of tags for things like species names. NB: Commenters can add tags (I think).

Simone, Fawzy and Luigi debate the virtues of different approaches to sharing germplasm information:

There are people who need and trust only the database type of information and others who are comfortable, productive and creative with more informal, network type of knowledge sharing. The fact is that the second type of user group has been heavily neglected in the past.

In which user group do you fall?

Andre gets to the heart of the Kokopelli spat, I fear:

Humping from one blog to another, you can see that it is very, very personal between former friends, and very ugly.

Do have your say too.

James raises a thought on the discussion of genetic engineers he precipitated:

I think there are many traits that could be generated by the non-profit sector and freely introgressed into lots of different cultivars and landraces which would materially improve the lives of people around the world. It’s much harder (if not impossible) to think of genetically engineered traits that would generate more good than $150 million dollars spent on other projects.

Costs, meet benefits.

Bruce McF puts that global map of water availability in perspective:

So it might not look like much on the map, but its more than half the Australian population predicted to be faced with high or moderate water stress.

Yikes.