Natural Science Collections: America's Irreplaceable Resource

Thematic Clustering of Geographic Resource Metadata Collections

Spatial Data Infrastructures at national or higher levels usually comprise the access to multiple geographic data catalogs. However, with classical search systems, it is difficult to have a clear idea of the information contained in the metadata holdings of these catalogs. This paper describes a set of clustering techniques to create a thematic classification of geographic resource collections ...

Natural science.

Natural Languages as Collections of Resources *

We propose a shift in perspective from the view of natural languages as formal languages to natural languages as a collection of resources for constructing local languages for use in particular situations. This is suggested by our experience constructing natural language grammars for particular applications using the Grammatical Framework. It points to a research programme investigating how suc...

Brain Death and Irreplaceable Parts

Could a human being survive the complete death of his brain? I will argue that the answer is no. No human organism can survive the loss of its irreplaceable parts. Hence, when an irreplaceable part is gone, whatever remains is not numerically identical with the organism that existed previously. If you were the original organism, then you do not survive as the residuum. In this paper I give an e...

Paleozoology’s Dependence on Natural History Collections

Paleozoology (zooarchaeology and paleontology) depends on natural history collections, or comparative collections, of skeletons of known taxonomy. These skeletons permit taxonomic identification of paleozoological specimens, facilitate identification of taphonomically (perimortem and postmortem) modified and abnormal or pathological specimens, and provide metric data for monitoring clinal varia...