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"For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new."
Profile of Diane Ravitch who has changed her mind on education reform from market/business solutions to public education, pro-teachers union.
"Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, historian, and educator based in Berkeley, California. His work spans a huge range of topics and scales, as his new and utterly fascinating book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, makes clear.
From the fashionable worlds of Christian Dior and Playtex to the military-industrial complex working overtime on efforts to create a protective suit for U.S. exploration of the moon, and from early computerized analyses of urban management to an "android" history of the French court, all by way of long chapters on the experimental high-flyers and military theorists who collaborated to push human beings further and further above the weather—and eventually off the planet itself—de Monchaux's book shows the often shocking juxtapositions that give such rich texture and detail to the invention of the spacesuit: pressurized clothing for human survival in space."
However, there are fewer and fewer biologists who practice traditional taxonomy, or the collection, description, naming and categorization of organisms through intense study of their physical attributes. In general, the field of taxonomy, or systematics as it is often called, has been leaning towards the molecular end of the spectrum since genetic technology matured in the late 1970s and 1980s, and traditional taxonomic skills have been dwindling as older taxonomic experts retire. Many taxonomists blend traditional methods, such as morphological and behavioral study, with modern molecular techniques, such as DNA sequencing, to fully characterize their pet taxa. But taxonomists like Cognato and Hulcr, who rely on fieldwork and morphological study as core aspects of their taxonomic work, appear to be slowly going extinct.
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ames Rodman, a botanist and former NSF program director who was instrumental in creating the PEET program in the mid-1990s, says that the disappearance of traditional taxonomy is only part of a larger problem. "More broadly speaking, organismal biology is dying out," Rodman says, now in semi-retirement as museum research associate at the University of Washington's Burke Museum. He says that colleagues tell him all the time that even in high schools, biology field trips are seldom, if ever, taken—a trend that ripples up through the university level as survey courses in entomology, mycology, and other organismal disciplines cease to exist. "We're no longer interested in knowing about the organisms of the world. That's the sadder tragedy."
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Quentin Wheeler, the Arizona State University entomologist who is also director of the newly-created International Institute for Species Exploration, says that he hopes to create a "cyber-infrastructure," including digital images and virtual networks, that will give researchers around the world access to all of the nearly 3 billion biological specimens currently housed at natural history museums. He says that if modern technologies and more funding are successfully combined with continued taxonomic work, taxonomists have a good chance of describing and naming 8 million new species in the next 50 years.
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