A great quiz, not so well done

Questionable Mosquito I was thrilled to see a Tweet from Farming First asking How much do you know about agriculture, nutrition and health? Lots, and I love online quizzes and the opportunity to show off. Who doesn’t? So I hurried on over, to discover a quiz from IFPRI, tied to the meeting on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition & Health, which opens tomorrow in New Delhi. ((And how did I miss it first time around? Apologies.)) It is really nice, with a good mix of questions and types of answers. I only really carped at one, pictured over there. Perhaps you can guess why. Anyway, I had a good time answering all the questions, definitely stumped for a few. Discovered I had to give them all sorts of demographic information; well, there’s no free lunch. So now can I have my results and the obligatory share this with all your friends or we’ll hate you forever link? No such luck. Instead I got sent to the answers, ((No peeking, as if you would.)) and instructions to give myself one point for every right answer and zero for wrong answers. But not my own answers, right or wrong. I couldn’t precisely remember them either, and we all know how easy it is to misremember in one’s favour. I think I got five wrong, four if we can have an argument about the way the question was worded. I did get the mosquito question right, because I knew what they meant, even if they didn’t.

Bottom line: It’s a good quiz, worth spending a few minutes on.

Plant and Animal Genome meeting unactionable?

We briefly noted Greg Baute’s thoughts on the genebank session of the Plant and Animal Genome Conference just ended. ((My own view being that the people working on easing access to genebank information need to be over at Greg’s blog bringing him up to speed.)) For another point of view, here’s the take-home message from Pat Heslop-Harrison, editor of Annals of Botany.

[U]nlike the previous meetings, this week, I’m finding it hard to see what NEW areas we will be publishing from results being presented.

And lest you think that’s overdramatic, Pat’s list of areas that did emerge from the previous 18 PAG conferences is pretty astonishing. Not having been there, I can’t say whether there is indeed a big idea that somehow eluded Pat; it seems very unlikely. If, however, the big idea is how to stay afloat on the sea of genome data, then yes, I guess we are still waiting for the liferafts to inflate.