blivet radio
The Radio weblog of Hal Rager

Monday, June 3, 2002

Jenny pretty much sums it up I have been watching the RSS frenzy for a bit, kind of out of the corner of my eye. RSS Everywhere Today. Not only is it RSS news day around the blogosphere, but in addition to Steven's article, Meryl reviews AmphetaDesk, Mike McBride gives us The Free News Aggregator Showdown 2002 [via Library Techlog], and Ben Hammersley notes that "Philip Chung has a Flash News Reader." Also, Mark Kraft left the following comment: "...just wanted to pass along that all LiveJournal users have RSS feeds available again. just add a /rss to the URL of any journal or community and you will get access to the feed. This is sort of a big thing, because that's over half a million RSS feeds. Not chopped liver."   [The Shifted Librarian] 9:56:00 PM    comment   trackback []

Wildlife Surprisingly Sensitive To Landscape Changes "A team of researchers led by William F. Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute reviewed more than 340 articles and papers generated by the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), the world's largest and longest-running study of habitat fragmentation, since its inception in 1979. They found that the effect of habitat fragmentation on the structure, composition and function of rainforests is far-reaching and widely felt. It increases local extinction rates for many plant and animal species; drastically alters species richness and abundance; and disrupts ecological processes, as well as creating opportunities for non-native species invasions, altering forest carbon storage and increasing vulnerability to fire. "A surprising number of wildlife species are extremely sensitive to very small clearings," said Laurance. "Even a 30-meter-wide road alters the community composition of understory birds and other wildlife, and creates a complete barrier to the movements of some species."" more [Science Daily] Of course, its not just rainforest ecosystems that suffer from habitat fragmentation, especially when they are on the order of 30-meter roads. Any ecosystem suffers with those kinds of impacts. At least this sort of thing is finally being documented. 8:14:33 PM    comment   trackback []

Beryl Pfizer. "I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on." [Quotes of the Day] Now, we grab it from our aggregator and drop it in our blog. Then we make google find it. I think that's an improvement. 8:02:06 PM    comment   trackback []