scholarly journals Leveraging Collective Experience to Digitize the Fossil Insects of Los Angeles

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26385
Author(s):  
Lindsay Walker ◽  
Erica Krimmel ◽  
Jann Vendetti ◽  
Austin Hendy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fossil Insects ◽  
Test Case ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Fossil Insect ◽  
Research And Education ◽  
La Brea Tar Pits ◽  
Rancho La Brea

The Invertebrate Paleontology Collection at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA) has received support from the United States National Science Foundation (NSF DBI 1702342) to digitize the museum’s unique and historic collection of 28,000+ fossil insects. The primary goal of this project, “Fossil Insects of L.A.”, is to increase access to these collections for both research and education. Key collections to be become discoverable through iDigBio and iDigPaleo include the Georg Statz Collection (Oligocene, Rott Formation, Germany) and three faunas from Southern California: Barstow (Miocene), Rancho La Brea (Pleistocene), and McKittrick (Pleistocene). Fossil Insects of L.A. constitutes the final contribution to the Fossil Insect Collaborative Thematic Collections Network (TCN), a consortium of institutions that have been digitizing the largest fossil insect collections in the United States. As a project beginning at the tail-end of the TCN’s active funding, Fossil Insects of L.A. is actively leveraging existing TCN knowledge and resources to streamline workflows and efficiently achieve project goals. In addition to basing imaging and preservation protocols on those designed by TCN partners, Fossil Insects of L.A. is using a layered approach to provide high-quality taxonomic information without sacrificing the pace of specimen digitization. Previously unidentified specimens are initially identified only to Order, allowing them to quickly continue through the digitization process; specimens can then be re-examined by experienced project participants and external experts, who are able to reference the specimen images generated during digitization. A critical and novel aspect of this component of the project’s workflow is the concurrent digitization of the literature associated with the Statz Collection. These data will be used as a test case for the "Enhancing Paleontological and Neontological Data Discovery API" (ePANDDA) project (NSF ICER 1821039), which seeks to associate related datasets found in iDigBio, iDigPaleo, and the Paleobiology Database. Fossil Insects of L.A. will digitize and make 10,960 specimens publically available online, of which over 6,200 will include images. An additional 15,684 specimen records from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits will also be included in the data mobilization. In doing so, Fossil Insects of L.A. intends to dramatically enhance the research potential of these formerly hidden collections, as well as synthesize and demonstrate digitization best practices generated through the TCN.

scholarly journals Bringing Back the Buzzing of the Bees: Enhancing the Discovery of Fossil Insect Collections with the ePANDDA API

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26496
Author(s):  
Austin Hendy ◽  
Lindsay Walker ◽  
Erica Krimmel ◽  
Jocelyn Sessa
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Fossil Insects ◽  
Type Specimens ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Fossil Insect ◽  
Bibliographic Records ◽  
Research And Education

The enhancing Paleontological and Neontological Data Discovery API (ePANDDA) project (NSF ICER 1821039) has developed an application programming interface (API) to integrate online paleontological and neontological databases, including the Paleobiology Database, iDigBio, and iDigPaleo. This connectivity provides a synthetic resource of information on all aspects of specimens, taxa, and localities. Here we present a case study that demonstrates how the ePANDDA API is being utilized to aid the digitization and dissemination of natural history collections, connect relevant disassociated data, and create added value to each of those resources. The Invertebrate Paleontology Collection at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA) is presently contributing data to the NSF-funded Fossil Insect Collaborative TCN (http://fossilinsects.colorado.edu). A cornerstone of the “Fossil Insects of L.A.” contribution (NSF DBI 1702342) is the historic Georg Statz Collection of fossil insects from the Rott Formation (Oligocene) of Germany. This collection of spectacularly preserved compression fossils was extensively described between the 1920s and 1940s, creating a comprehensive published record, which has been entered into the Paleobiology Database. Several thousand specimens of Statz’ collection, including over 900 type specimens, left Europe in the 1950s to be permanently reposited at the NHMLA. While important to their long-term conservation, this move has hampered collection access by the research community. The ePANDDA project will be able to link specimen record data hosted in iDigBio with bibliographic and taxonomic data reposited in the Paleobiology Database. In addition, programmatic development of the Paleobiology Database now allows for the tracking of fossil occurrences at the resolution of individual specimen records, and better documents the institutions with which those specimens are reposited. Therefore, images of NHMLA specimens, together with historic photographs, drawings, and annotations, will be discoverable through the Paleobiology Database and associated with the bibliographic records within which they were originally described or listed. Seamless search and discovery among these online resources enriches the potential of the historic Statz collection and augments its value for both research and education. We anticipate greater visibility of this and other NHMLA collections as a result of creating such linkages.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Forging Aztecness: Twentieth-Century Mexican Musical Nationalism in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
KRISTINA F. NIELSEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Siglo Xx

Abstract (Spanish/English)Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los ÁngelesHoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.

The Three Rs in Research and Education: A Long Road Ahead in the United States

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Barbara Orlans
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Animal Experiments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Education Student ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Research And Education ◽  
The Right ◽  
Student Projects ◽  
Institutional Oversight ◽  
The Three Rs

Attitudes toward the Three Rs concept of refinement, reduction and replacement in the United States in research and education are widely divergent. Positive responses have come from several sources, notably from four centres established to disseminate information about alternatives. Funding sources to support work in the Three Rs have proliferated. The activities of institutional oversight committees have resulted in the nationwide implementation of important refinements. In the field of education, student projects involving pain or death for sentient animals have declined, and the right of students to object to participation in animal experiments on ethical grounds has been widely established. However, there is still a long way to go. Resistance to alternatives is deep-seated within several of the scientific disciplines most closely associated with animal research. The response of the National Institutes of Health to potentially important Congressional directives on the Three Rs has been unsatisfactory. The prestigious National Association of Biology Teachers, which at first endorsed the use of alternatives in education, later rescinded this policy, because of opposition to it. An impediment to progress is the extreme polarisation of viewpoints between the biomedical community and the animal protectionists.

scholarly journals Planning for the Control of Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) in Los Angeles County and the United States

2011 ◽  
Vol 173 (10) ◽  
pp. 1121-1130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. L. Chao ◽  
L. Matrajt ◽  
N. E. Basta ◽  
J. D. Sugimoto ◽  
B. Dean ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Pandemic Influenza ◽  
Influenza A ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The United States ◽  
Influenza A H1n1

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Single Word ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”

European Strategic Autonomy: The Test Case of Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-477
Author(s):  
Sascha Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Test Case ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Special Purpose Vehicle ◽  
The Face ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Security Actor ◽  
Strategic Autonomy

Abstract The ideal of the European Union (EU) as a global peace and security actor is increasingly clashing with the reality of a multipolar world defined by militarised conflict, and a loosening of the formerly close trans-Atlantic relationship with the United States. European policy-makers have identified strategic autonomy as a possible remedy in the face of a growing number of internal and external security threats. This paper adds to the conceptualisation of strategic autonomy by contextualising its current usage and political genealogy. Empirically, European strategic autonomy is examined concerning the efforts to preserve the Iranian nuclear deal after the Trump administration had ceased US participation in May 2018. In particular, the paper assesses the European response to counter the re-imposed unilateral United States (US) sanctions against European individuals and entities by updating the so-called blocking regulation, and setting up a special purpose vehicle (spv) for facilitating trade with Iran. The results show that the European struggle toward achieving strategic autonomy has largely failed, but that it holds valuable lessons to approximate this ideal in the future.

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