The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Do you know the party game "Telephone", also known as "Chinese Whispers"? The first player whispers a message in the ear of the next player, who passes the message in the same way to a third player, and so on. When the last player has heard the whispered message, the starting and finishing versions of the message are spoken out loud. The two versions are rarely the same.
The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. According to w3techs, seven out of every eight websites in the Alexa top 10 million are UTF-8 encoded. This is good news for us screenscrapers, because it means that when we scrape data into a UTF-8 encoded document, the chances are good that all the characters will be correctly encoded and displayed. It's not quite good news for two reasons.
The follow is a guest post by Bob Mesibov, who has contributed to iPhylo before. Like many iPhylo readers, I deal with large, pre-existing compilations of biodiversity data. The compilations come from museums, herbaria, aggregation projects and government agencies.
The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. The i4Life project has very kindly liberated Catalogue of Life (CoL) data from its database, and you can now download the latest CoL as a set of plain text, tab-separated tables here.
The following is a first for iPhylo, a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Rod Page introduced 'dark taxa' here on iPhylo in April 2011. He wrote: Rod suggested that 'quite a lot' of biology can be done without taxonomic names. For the dark taxa in GenBank, that might well mean doing biology without organisms – a surprising thought if you're a whole-organism biologist.