As per the declaration of the United Nations, 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. Now, we have to think and act on preserving the species of organisms from mega-biodiversity nations for our present and future research. This is high time also to establish such banks in developing countries too, in many of which the term Environmental Specimen Bank is still unheard of. “
“The authors regret that there is an error in Table Trichostatin A clinical trial 2. Nutrient fluxes should be in units of 106 moles y−1. This correction does not alter any of the other results or the conclusions. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience
caused. “
“In the article entitled, “Improving Safety and Operational Efficiency in Residential Care Settings with WiFi-Based Localization” (Volume 13, pages 558-563 of the July 2012 issue), the fifth author’s surname was listed incorrectly. The correct surname is Curtis. “
“We are writing this Editorial after listening to an index-laden graduate student presentation at a scientific conference, in which it was proposed that new indices be developed and
compared to existing indices. At the end we both stood up independently and suggested that Proteasome inhibitor review this was not a useful exercise. But new papers are still being published proposing and using new indices. Clearly this student is not the only one confused by what we would call bad scientific practice. Credible scientists should not be developing or relying on single number representations of complex data. And they should not be misleading non-scientists that this is appropriate or even useful. Indices are appealing because they can be used to reduce complex data to single numbers, which seem easy to understand. But that is not biological or environmental reality, which is rarely 1-dimensional. At best reduction to an index means loss of information. Both of us have consistently tried throughout our careers to convince scientists and others that indices can be misleading
and, if used at all, should not be used in isolation (e.g., Green, 1979 and Chapman, 1996). We have had good company in those attempts. A few examples: Hurlbert (1971) provided an early critique of species diversity and of indices supposedly measuring it, in which he referred to “many semantic, conceptual, and technical problems”. He suggested that “species diversity has become a meaningless Interleukin-3 receptor concept [and] that the term be abandoned”. Eberhardt (1976) provided a critique of metrics in general, including diversity indices. He preferred model-based mathematical and statistical analyses. Washington (1984) provides an excellent review of diversity, biotic and similarity indices in which he documents how they are misused because they are often highly specialized to a particular type of water pollution (usually organic pollution), limited to specific geographic areas, and of limited ecological relevance. More recent authors have also critiqued indices. Boyle et al.