Ambitious plan evolves to put Darwin online

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

IN A ROOM in India, two people sit carefully typing the same passage of text by Charles Darwin into a central computer.

Sophisticated software monitors their progress and, if either of them enters so much as a single letter or comma different to the other, they are met with a flashing warning sign.

This process is called Double Blind Key Transcription, and it's just one element of an ambitious Cambridge University project to the put the complete works of the father of evolutionary biology onto the internet.

This is no small task. As well as his famous books, the project aims to make available every article and unpublished manuscript by Darwin - along with thousands of articles about him - in digital form.
According to project director John van Whye, nothing is too insignificant for inclusion.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/features/2005/10/14/31647bc7-cfd5-4960-b5e6-9b780238f6f8.lpf

[MarianJack]

1. Just One Thing Bothers Me!

"In a Room In India"

[SnowGoose]

3. Well, Darwin wasn't an American

and Cambridge University isn't an American school, so why not send it to some other former British colony where they still respect science?

Maybe we don't deserve to be the leaders in science any more.

[MarianJack]

5. I Wasn't Sounding a protectionist note,...

...but re-reading my post, I'm not entirely confortable with the phrasing of it, either. I certainly DON'T begrudge a person in India accepting a JOB.

I have NO argument with you, SnowGoose, about our not deserving to be leaders in science anymore. Certainly not with the truly MAD rush to creationism that the righties are trying to ram down our throats. If I were a college admissions officer, I'd have a hard time accepting a student who had been taught creationist theory as a science.

[SnowGoose]

6. Isn't it just depressing as hell?

Science has done such a nice job of letting us know the how/what/when/where of our existence. It truly demoralizes me that so many are so eager to turn their backs on it - even ridicule it.

As an aside, I was raised believing the 6000-year old earth/literal Noah's ark, etc (church school). But when I went to University (even though it was a creationist University) and took biology, I came to the inescapable conclusion that what I had believed all my life was wrong.

So I get some measure of encouragement out of that - eventually, inquisitive people stand a good chance of figuring it out, if given an understanding of the underlying science.

Maybe there's hope.

[MarianJack]

8. I Taught Catholic School For 6 Years...

...and ALWAYS advocated that Evolution is the real thing.

Anybody with a brain knows that the Old Testament is metaphorical!

I have a niece in a fundie cult in Northern Virginia who whited out any year in a book about dinosaurs that my sister gave to the kids and wrote :100 years" over it for when the dinosaurs lived. SCARY!

[RC]

2. Haven't they heard of OCR?

Optical Character Recognition.

[Chan790]

4. Accuracy is too low.

only about 98%. Doesn't seem like much but on a copy of Joyce's Ullysses it was recently measured to 1455 errors, some significant. The complete works of Darwin including Origin of Species is 3x as long.

[hunter]

7. People are better than OCR.

Raw image files are better than OCR.

OCR tends to fail in spectacular ways if you dare depend upon it.