Educate Kermit Roosevelt Through Sport Hunting and Train Him for Government Missions. Roosevelt Scientific Mission to English Equatorial Africa in 1909

The practice of sport hunting in colonized areas presents a set of knowledge and techniques indispensable to self-control and the domination of territories elsewhere by colonial empires, by their leaders and, more generally, by the political elites of the Northern states. During his scientific mission to English Equatorial Africa in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt responded to a double commission from the Smithsonian Institute and the American Museum in Washington. In this African mission, he brought and trained his youngest son Kermit, aged 20, in an initiatory journey. This article proposes to study this ritual of passage and the practice of sport hunting in the English colonial space as a revelation of the socio-racial hierarchies at work in the territories dominated by the English Empire.

Usability of velocities of GNSS campaign measurements on volcano monitoring depending distance between station and volcano

<p>GNSS campaign measurements are often used for also volcano monitoring. The most important reason for this is that the permanent stations near the volcano are costly and likely to be damaged after the eruption. Often, even campaign measurements are risky near an active volcano. On the other hand, it would be low risky and low costly to make campaign measurements distant from volcano activities and eruptions. In this study, in order to expound the analysis results, we constituted our global test area using five IGS stations around five active volcano eruptions over 2019 via the Smithsonian Institute Global Volcanism Program. The data archives of the International GNSS service (IGS) and the time series of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were used for the purpose. And then we decimated the continuous data down to monthly and four monthly sampled GPS campaign time series. We also generated random values of ±3 mm for possible antenna setup errors. We tested whether the velocities obtained from monthly and four monthly solutions differ significantly from the velocities derived from daily solutions. As a result, we concluded on monthly velocities that horizontal components are compatible completely and 80% of the vertical components are compatible. We also concluded on four monthly velocities that 65% of the horizontal components are compatible and vertical components are compatible completely. We explained the utilization of campaign measurements in volcano monitoring by examining the effect of the distance between the stations and volcanoes on the results obtained.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Volcano Monitoring, GNSS Campaign Measurements.</p>

Correction to: An update and reassessment of fern and lycophyte diversity data in the Japanese Archipelago

In the original publication of this article, the affiliation of one of the authors was listed incorrectly as “Smithsonian Institute”.

Finding scientific names in Biodiversity Heritage Library, or how to shrink Big Data

The Biodiversity Heritage Library contains 57 million pages of biological information. The majority of this information is a scanned and digitized non-structured text. This "raw" text is hard to access by computers or humans, without the addition of rich metadata. Recent improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) promise to facilitate the creation of such metadata. One obvious approach to improve BHL usability is to extract and provide an index of scientific names thereby enabling biologists to find useful information easier and faster. The Global Names Architecture (GNA) detects, verifies, collects, and indexes scientific names from many sources. Six years ago GNA developers created an index of the scientific names in the BHL by parsing every page one by one. This took 45 days to accomplish. Almost immediately BHL users began to find problems in the index and suggest improvements. However, the cost of repeating such a gigantic job was insurmountable and as a result the index remained nearly unchanged for 6 years. Two problems were at the heart of dealing with the “Big Data” of the BHL, the time it took to transfer the raw data prior to processing, and the computational time it took to detect the names themselves.To solve these problems we could either throw more hardware resources into the problem (expensive), or find ways to dramatically improve performance of the tasks (cheaper). We decided to achieve our goal by utilizing hardware more effectively, and by using fast, scalable programming languages. We wrote several Open Source applications in Go and Scala to detect candidate scientific names then verify them as names by comparing them to 27 million scientific name-strings aggregated by GNA. We were able to speed up data mobilization from 24 hours to 11 minutes, and decrease the time for name detection from 35 days to 5 hours. Name-verification time decreased from 10 days to 9 hours. Overall our computing requirements shrank from 4 high-end servers to one modern laptop. As a result we achieved our goal and indexed BHL in only 14 hours and unlocked the reality of iterative improvements to the scientific name index. We also wanted to make it possible to study BHL data in its entirety remotely, in real-time. We created an HTTP2 service that is able to stream gigantic amounts of BHL textual data together with scientific names to a researcher. Sending the text of 50 million pages with an associated 250 million name occurrences takes ~5 hours. For comparison, simply copying BHL text data from Smithsonian Institute to University of Illinois using more traditional methods took us 10 days. What do we hope to achieve with these tools as next steps? To make it possible for everyone to make new discoveries by computing in real-time across the complete BHL text. For example 20% of all names in BHL are abbreviated, and, as a result, very poorly searchable given their existing full-text indexing. We plan to develop algorithms to expand abbreviated genera reliably. Digitized texts contain huge amounts of character recognition mistakes. The tools might help to detect badly digitized pages and mark them for re-digitization. Tools can help to extract scientific names that are identical to "normal" words, such as "Atlanta", or "America", to find common names in texts, and to localize information on locations, adding new search contexts. Finally, we are exploring tools that allow researchers to stream such results back to source thereby growing the “Big Data” and ultimately improving the BHL’s end-user experience.

The relationship between global volcanic activity and variations in the velocity of Earth's rotation

Analysis of observations of the Earth's rotational velocity and volcanic activity of the planet from 1720 until 2015 suggests that higher volcanic activity temporally coincided with periods of decreased angular velocity of Earth's rotation (deceleration), and, vice versa, lower volcanic activity coincided with the periods of increased velocity of the Earth's rotation (acceleration). Our analysis employed the data from the catalog by the Smithsonian Institute, United States, in which each volcanic explosion had its own determined value of the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). The total number of selected intensive eruptions with VEI > 4 was 160, including 25 eruptions with VEI > 5. At present (beginning from 2006), the Earth was entry in a deceleration phase and series of catastrophic eruptions reveals the tendency toward intensifying volcanic activity.

Applications of Coded Osteological Data from the Smithsonian Repatriation Database for the Study of Violence in the Past

Chapter 5 explores an innovative data mining approach in order to show that archived data can be used to answer important anthropological questions about mass violence. It shows that the use of archived data allows for the collection of larger sample sizes and the exploration of broader patterns of violence. The method is demonstrated through the examination of a large sample size of Arikara individuals from ten archaeological sites gathered from the Smithsonian Institute database. Through the application of this method, evidence for perimortem trauma was discovered for several individuals, including males, females, and subadults, and it included evidence of the mutilation of some victims.

Joseph Henry (The 220th Anniversary of His Birth)

A brief overview of the main works and achievements of Joseph Henry, an eminent American scientist, the first director of the now world-famous Smithsonian Institute, is presented. He discovered many physical phenomena, but did not write about them and did not receive patents. Therefore, his discoveries were reopened by other people and bear their names. The name of Henry himself carries a unit of inductance. Henry was among the first 50 outstanding scientists included by President Lincoln in the US Academy of Sciences, and since 1868 was its permanent president.Discoveries and inventions made by Joseph Henry, underlie the work of most electrical devices. He created the most powerful electromagnet of that time, the world's first electromagnetic relay and electric bell, developed the first in the US model of a telegraph with an audible signal, provided unselfish support in the works of S.F. Morse and A.G. Bella. Henry discovered the phenomena of electromagnetic self-induction and transformation, conducted numerous meteorological observations. Being the main scientific adviser to the US government, he laid down the scientific foundations of weather forecasting methods and organized a federal meteorological service. There are interesting facts from Henry's life and work.

Equinodermos del Museo de Zoología de la Universidad de Costa Rica

Echinoderms from the Museum of Zoology from the Universidad de Costa Rica. The Museum of Zoology, Universidad de Costa Rica (MZUCR) was founded in 1966 and houses the most complete collection of vertebrates and invertebrates in Costa Rica. The MZUCR currently has 24 collections containing more than five million specimens, and more than 13 000 species. The earliest collections date back to 1960 and include fishes, reptiles, amphibians, polychaetes, crustaceans and echinoderms. For the latter group, the MZUCR has a total of 157 species, in 1 173 lots and 4 316 specimens. These 157 species represent 54% of the total species of echinoderms from Costa Rica. The remaining species are distributed in the following institutions: California Academy of Sciences (CAS) (4.8%), Scripps Oceanographic Institute (SIO) (5.2%), National Echinoderm Collection “Dr. Ma. Elena Caso” from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (ICML-UNAM) (12.7%), the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute (USNM) (35.1%), and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (19.2%). There may be material from Costa Rica in the Natural History Museum of Denmark (NCD) and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles (LACM), however, there was no access to such collections. There are 9.6% that do not appear in museums, but are reported in the literature. Based on this revision, the taxonomic list of echinoderms for Costa Rica is updated to 293 species, 152 genera, 75 families, 30 orders and 5 classes. The Pacific coast of Costa Rica has 153 species, followed by the Isla del Coco with 134 and the Caribbean coast with 65. Holothuria is the most diverse genus with 25 species. Rev. Biol. Trop. 65(Suppl. 1): S272-S287. Epub 2017 November 01.

Seismic Fragility Analysis of the Smithsonian Institute Museum Support Center

This paper presents the seismic fragility assessment of the Smithsonian Institute Museum Support Center (MSC), which sustained appreciable damage during the 2011 Virginia earthquake. A three-dimensional (3-D) finite element model (FEM) for the building was created and validated using measured dynamic characteristics determined from field vibration test data. Two suites of bidirectional ground motions at different hazard levels were applied to the FEM to generate fragility curves for structural as well as nonstructural (storage cabinets) damage. The effect of brace yielding strength on structural and nonstructural damage is also investigated to provide recommendations for future retrofit. The fragility curves show that the spectral acceleration to cause structural damage to the building is not high. Due to low seismicity, however, the probability for the structure to be damaged at the design basis earthquake is small. Nevertheless, the probability for nonstructural damage is considerable, which is an important issue related to the seismic performance of the building.