Finishing this up....
Oct. 8th, 2010 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyAn article on a self-teaching computer, haven't read it yet
Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence.
Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day.
Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.
“For all the advances in computer science, we still don’t have a computer that can learn as humans do, cumulatively, over the long term,” said the team’s leader, Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist and chairman of the machine learning department.
The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”
NELL also learns facts that are relations between members of two categories. For example, Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts — even if it has never read that Mr. Manning plays for the Colts. “Plays for” is a relation, and there are 280 kinds of relations. The number of categories and relations has more than doubled since earlier this year, and will steadily expand.
The learned facts are continuously added to NELL’s growing database, which the researchers call a “knowledge base.” A larger pool of facts, Dr. Mitchell says, will help refine NELL’s learning algorithms so that it finds facts on the Web more accurately and more efficiently over time.
NELL is one project in a widening field of research and investment aimed at enabling computers to better understand the meaning of language. Many of these efforts tap the Web as a rich trove of text to assemble structured ontologies — formal descriptions of concepts and relationships — to help computers mimic human understanding. The ideal has been discussed for years, and more than a decade ago Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the underlying software for the World Wide Web, sketched his vision of a “semantic Web.”
Today, ever-faster computers, an explosion of Web data and improved software techniques are opening the door to rapid progress. Scientists at universities, government labs, Google, Microsoft, I.B.M. and elsewhere are pursuing breakthroughs, along somewhat different paths.
For example, I.B.M.’s “question answering” machine, Watson, shows remarkable semantic understanding in fields like history, literature and sports as it plays the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Google Squared, a research project at the Internet search giant, demonstrates ample grasp of semantic categories as it finds and presents information from around the Web on search topics like “U.S. presidents” and “cheeses.”
Still, artificial intelligence experts agree that the Carnegie Mellon approach is innovative. Many semantic learning systems, they note, are more passive learners, largely hand-crafted by human programmers, while NELL is highly automated. “What’s exciting and significant about it is the continuous learning, as if NELL is exercising curiosity on its own, with little human help,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, who leads a project called TextRunner, which reads the Web to extract facts.
Computers that understand language, experts say, promise a big payoff someday. The potential applications range from smarter search (supplying natural-language answers to search queries, not just links to Web pages) to virtual personal assistants that can reply to questions in specific disciplines or activities like health, education, travel and shopping.
“The technology is really maturing, and will increasingly be used to gain understanding,” said Alfred Spector, vice president of research for Google. “We’re on the verge now in this semantic world.”
With NELL, the researchers built a base of knowledge, seeding each kind of category or relation with 10 to 15 examples that are true. In the category for emotions, for example: “Anger is an emotion.” “Bliss is an emotion.” And about a dozen more.
Then NELL gets to work. Its tools include programs that extract and classify text phrases from the Web, programs that look for patterns and correlations, and programs that learn rules. For example, when the computer system reads the phrase “Pikes Peak,” it studies the structure — two words, each beginning with a capital letter, and the last word is Peak. That structure alone might make it probable that Pikes Peak is a mountain. But NELL also reads in several ways. It will mine for text phrases that surround Pikes Peak and similar noun phrases repeatedly. For example, “I climbed XXX.”
NELL, Dr. Mitchell explains, is designed to be able to grapple with words in different contexts, by deploying a hierarchy of rules to resolve ambiguity. This kind of nuanced judgment tends to flummox computers. “But as it turns out, a system like this works much better if you force it to learn many things, hundreds at once,” he said.
For example, the text-phrase structure “I climbed XXX” very often occurs with a mountain. But when NELL reads, “I climbed stairs,” it has previously learned with great certainty that “stairs” belongs to the category “building part.” “It self-corrects when it has more information, as it learns more,” Dr. Mitchell explained.
NELL, he says, is just getting under way, and its growing knowledge base of facts and relations is intended as a foundation for improving machine intelligence. Dr. Mitchell offers an example of the kind of knowledge NELL cannot manage today, but may someday. Take two similar sentences, he said. “The girl caught the butterfly with the spots.” And, “The girl caught the butterfly with the net.”
A human reader, he noted, inherently understands that girls hold nets, and girls are not usually spotted. So, in the first sentence, “spots” is associated with “butterfly,” and in the second, “net” with “girl.”
“That’s obvious to a person, but it’s not obvious to a computer,” Dr. Mitchell said. “So much of human language is background knowledge, knowledge accumulated over time. That’s where NELL is headed, and the challenge is how to get that knowledge.”
A helping hand from humans, occasionally, will be part of the answer. For the first six months, NELL ran unassisted. But the research team noticed that while it did well with most categories and relations, its accuracy on about one-fourth of them trailed well behind. Starting in June, the researchers began scanning each category and relation for about five minutes every two weeks. When they find blatant errors, they label and correct them, putting NELL’s learning engine back on track.
When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)
NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.
His ideal, Dr. Mitchell said, was a computer system that could learn continuously with no need for human assistance. “We’re not there yet,” he said. “But you and I don’t learn in isolation either.”
Spaghetti tacos, a more interesting article than it sounds
IT started as a gag: spaghetti tacos.
On an episode of the hit Nickelodeon series “iCarly,” the lead character’s eccentric older brother, Spencer, makes dinner one night. Glimpsed on screen, the dish consists of red-sauce-coated pasta stuffed into hard taco shells. What could be more unappealing?
When Julian Stuart-Burns, 8, asked his mother to make the tacos one night, she simply laughed. “I thought he was joking,” said Jennifer Burns, a Brooklyn mother of three. “But then he kept asking.”
Ms. Burns finally gave in — like thousands of other moms — and cooked up the punch line for Julian’s birthday party.
That punch line has now become part of American children’s cuisine, fostering a legion of imitators and improvisers across the country. Spurred on by reruns, Internet traffic, slumber parties and simple old-fashioned word of mouth among children, spaghetti tacos are all the rage. Especially if you’re less than 5 feet tall and live with your mother.
Mom blogs and cooking Web sites are filled with recipes from dozens of desperate parents who have been confronted with how to feed their offspring the popular gag. A Facebook page has sprung up with more than 1,200 fans.
There’s a dessert version, made with brownie mix, white frosting and strawberry preserves; a guacamole-covered version, with Mexican-flavored tomato sauce, at Barefoot Kitchen Witch, the Web site of the Rhode Island blogger Jayne Maker; and a recipe available at spaghettitacos.com that uses Italian sausage and peppers.
Ed Dzitko, a dad from Woodbury, Conn., uses oversize taco shells to fit in more spaghetti. Cheryl Trombetta, a grandmother from Secaucus, N.J., makes them whenever her 5-year-old grandson asks. A woman in Lincoln, Neb., posted a meat-sauce version on Food.com in the winter, crediting her 7-year-old son with the idea. And Karen Petersen, a mother of two from Rye, N.H., fries her own taco shells and breaks the spaghetti into thirds to make the strands fit more easily.
“Clearly, it’s spread like a virus,” said Ms. Petersen, a self-described “foodie,” who said that she has made them several times for her 11-year-old daughter, Amelia.
After seeing them on the show, Amelia was served the tacos at a friend’s slumber party this year and then begged her mom to make them.
“The mixture of spaghetti and tacos is odd,” Amelia admitted. “But it’s actually pretty good. They’re one of my favorite foods. I guess kids like making them because they think it’s cool to be like the people from ‘iCarly.’ ”
But the real reason, she said, is that “the taste is really, really good.”
For those who need to be brought up to speed, “iCarly” is about a teenage girl, raised by her brother, who creates a weekly show for the Web with her best friends. No one seems more surprised by the vast popularity of spaghetti tacos than the creator of “iCarly,” Dan Schneider, who invented the gag three years ago.
“It was just a little joke I came up with for one episode,” Mr. Schneider said. “Then it turned into a running joke. And now it’s this thing people actually do.”
For Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, the question is not why kids are asking for spaghetti tacos, but why they haven’t asked for them sooner.
“This combination seems to be an inevitability, sort of like chocolate and peanut butter running into each other on that Reese’s commercial,” he said. “The amazement should be only that it took ‘iCarly’ to bring it into our melting pot of a culture.”
“Spaghetti tacos has made it possible to eat spaghetti in your car,” he said. “It’s a very important technological development. You don’t even need a plate.”
Perhaps the nearest pop-culture equivalent — that is, a sitcom artifact that thrives in the real world — is Festivus, an alternative to Christmas introduced on a 1997 “Seinfeld” episode, Mr. Thompson said. Festivus now has a number of real adherents.
Mr. Schneider said he came up with the spaghetti taco idea while writing a first-season episode, broadcast on Nov. 10, 2007, in which Spencer finds himself in the kitchen. “Spencer’s an artist, a sculptor, he wears socks that light up,” Mr. Schneider explained. “So he’s not going to make a roast chicken for dinner.”
The joke resurfaced in five more episodes, but what pushed the dish onto the front burner of parental consciousness was an entire show devoted to it — a cook-off between Carly and a crazy chef named Ricky Flame — which was broadcast in September 2009.
Ms. Burns, the Brooklyn mom, was an early adopter, having made the tacos about three months after the dish was first mentioned.
“I had six boys coming over for dinner, and asked Julian what he wanted,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Spaghetti tacos.’ I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ ”
Julian, now 10, had never had them before and had never heard of anyone else making them besides Spencer and the cast of “iCarly.” “But I wanted them because they looked really delicious and fun to eat,” Julian said. “They’re really crunchy and they have my two favorite foods, spaghetti and tacos.”
Every kid at the party ate them, even Julian’s picky friend, Henry.
“P.B. & J., that’s the extent of this kid’s repertoire,” Ms. Burns said. “His mother was shocked.”
The boys, who have enjoyed them for the last three birthday celebrations, now compete to see who’ll eat the most. A boy named Jake won this year, with a record five spaghetti tacos. “I thought he was going to be sick,” Ms. Burns said.
The first time they made them, Ms. Burns’s husband cooked an elaborate homemade sauce. “But I said, that’s so unnecessary,” she said. “I’m not eating them.”
Now, Ms. Burns simply doctors a jar of tomato sauce.
Even Ms. Petersen, the New Hampshire mom who crisps up the tortillas to order, said she uses a prepackaged sauce.
“Hey, I’m frying the tacos,” she said, laughing.
Amelia will then use taco toppings for garnish: tomato, lettuce, onion. She hasn’t tried avocado yet, but she’s looking forward to it.
Often, Ms. Petersen will make the dish when Amelia has her friends over.
“They’ve been so influenced by the media,” she sighed. “They’ll make their own ‘iCarly’ show in her room and then come out and have the spaghetti tacos. It’s kind of a thing we do.”
The spaghetti taco phenomenon, Mr. Schneider said, actually fits with the Do Try This at Home spirit of “iCarly,” which encourages, and then uses, skits and bits made by the young people who are watching. That philosophy has now spread to the kitchen.
Some children bypass their parents altogether and make the dish themselves. Emma St. John, 10, of Montclair, N.J., has been making them since January, when she had them for the first time at a friend’s party.
She starts with a can of Red Pack tomato sauce and then adds “a little bit of this and a little bit of that”: chili powder, cinnamon, Singapore curry oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, oregano. Her parents help her warm the taco shells in the oven and boil the spaghetti, then she does the rest.
“Everyone likes it,” Emma said. Even her 13-year-old brother, Ethan. The first week of school, they ate spaghetti tacos five times. “It’s good for people to come home and have something to look forward to,” said her father, Allen.
Mr. Schneider, the writer, said he plans to have the “iCarly” cast to his house to make a batch in the next few months, so that he can tape it and post it on his YouTube account. He’s only had a low-calorie/low-fat version prepared by his wife, Lisa Lillien, whose Hungry Girl franchise appeals to weight-conscious snack-food lovers. “I’ve never tasted the real, real version.”
Cammie Ward Moise, a Houston mom who featured the tacos on her parenting site, Moms Material, under the heading “Crazy Dinner Night,” said she doesn’t just make them for her kids, but also enjoys them herself. Still, she adds: “It’s a great thing to make, especially when you’re having the food battles at home. It’s a fun way to get them excited about eating.”
Her children, Taylor, 11, and Myles, 9, love the dish, she said. “It’s something their idol is doing,” she said. “They love ‘iCarly’ and would probably eat anything the cast of the show ate.”
“Now,” Ms. Moise said, “we just have to get her to put broccoli in a taco.”
At Brooklyn High School Named for Murrow, the Television Studios Are Dark
Frankie Fidilio was collecting scrap metal for money in Brooklyn when the gleam of iron behind a school caught his eye. There were teetering stacks of old televisions, obsolete video transfer machines and clunky cassette recorders. Even a 250-pound stationary studio camera like something out of a museum.
A scrapper by trade, as well as a star in the reality show “Scrappers,” Mr. Fidilio called the custodian, who told him that the equipment was being junked and he was free to take it. “I was like, holy cow, this seems like a whole department,” Mr. Fidilio recalled telling him. “And he goes: ‘Yeah it is. They’re gone.’ ”
The ton and a half of metal Mr. Fidilio brought to the scrapyard in late June was just a sample of the dusty clutter in the now-decrepit television studio of a high school whose name was once synonymous with television: Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Brooklyn.
Anthony R. Lodico, the principal of Murrow, said the studio, where students had produced game shows, news segments and features and filmed student bands for decades, fell victim to budget cuts. He closed it in 2008 and told the custodian to start discarding the old equipment after a flood from a sink damaged some of it in June.
The fate of the studio shows how difficult it is to maintain an expensive program in a public school, especially one that is dependent on constantly changing technology. The school ended its regular public access television program in 2005, unable to keep up with the transition to digital. Mr. Lodico recently obtained a $110,000 city grant to see if he could transform the studio into a digital editing facility.
Television production never, in fact, merited a stand-alone department at Murrow, but for more than a generation of students who took the sequence of courses called TERM, or Television at Edward R. Murrow, to train for television careers, it might have seemed like one.
“Murrow was a magnet school, and the way it magnetized you was because it had really amazing facilities,” said Orrin Anderson, who graduated from the program in 1982 and now works in television as a video graphics artist and editor.
Murrow was founded in 1974 as a progressive high school that emphasized creativity, independence and the “communication arts.” When its television studios opened in the late 1970s, Mr. Anderson recalled, they had huge Hitachi color cameras and audio equipment that he once smuggled out of the building to record the Beastie Boys, founded in 1979 by a classmate, Adam Yauch.
English courses were named after the various shows hosted by Edward R. Murrow, like “Person to Person.” On those shows, Murrow, often clasping a cigarette, turned his glare on people and current events of the midcentury, memorably criticizing the conduct of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Murrow died in 1965 of lung cancer at 57.
Classes in law, Photoshop and digital music disappeared: an art computer lab resembles a tour of iMacs past. A bright spot is a working planetarium whose 30-year-old star projector still pivots perfectly under a white dome — the school just received a $150,000 grant to modernize it.
“It’s great we are named after Edward R. Murrow,” said Mr. Lodico, “but we want kids to be excited about a lot of things.”
The last teacher to run TERM, Yvonne Hanratty (now Massaro), persuaded ABC and other networks to donate modern equipment in the mid-1990s. She taught students to tape school plays, conduct roving interviews and produce a regular show on Brooklyn community access television, she recalled in an e-mail. But the digital revolution required yet another technology overhaul, for which the school lacked money.
There were also personal tensions. Ms. Massaro’s relationship with her supervisors soured after the 2004 retirement of the school’s founding principal, Saul Bruckner. By 2007, Mr. Lodico said, there were no longer enough students choosing her television courses to justify continuing them.
Ms. Massaro, who now teaches art at Murrow, has filed a lawsuit, claiming that the closing of the studio was part of a campaign of harassment against her, along with assigning her packed art classes with high percentages of special education students. Mr. Lodico denies the charges, and the city has moved to have the suit dismissed.
The high school, which has 4,000 students, is still considered one of Brooklyn’s best, and gets many more applicants than can attend. But it has been a struggle to maintain the emphasis on electives amid years of cuts; this year alone, it lost $1 million, or 4 percent of its operating budget.
Behind the locked door of the studio, now used for storage, are rows of ceiling-mounted Klieg lights and huge camera dollies pasted with NBC stickers. Strewn on the floor are copies of “The Heroic Truth,” a Murrow biography.
Another former studio has been repurposed into an English classroom; wires for lighting hang from the ceiling, and a control room serves as a vestibule.
Murrow still offers introductions to film and broadcasting, but there is a lighter emphasis on production, and students use their own cameras and home computers to shape their final projects, said Gary Ragovin, the teacher of one of the classes. Students who do not have a camera can share or do an alternative assignment, like scriptwriting.
“So far, it hasn’t been a problem,” he said.
Functioning television studios at high schools in the city are increasingly rare. Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx still has one, thanks to a $1 million grant from the City Council in 2003. But the mantle appears to have largely passed to a new generation of small schools that use mobile equipment and make film and television their animating purpose.
The Academy for Careers in Television and Film in Long Island City, Queens, for example, has one computer for each of its 320 students, a dozen video camera setups (each costing $3,000 to $4,000) and seven teachers with production experience. It just built a sound stage in a locker room. Some of the equipment came from a $400,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The school spends its money on faculty and equipment “and little else,” the principal, Mark Dunetz, said.
Maintaining the equipment, he said, “is a tremendously complex thing to do, and our goal is to put systems in place so that we won’t be overly dependent on one or two individuals, including me.”
Footprint Fossils Offer Earliest Evidence of Dinosaurs’ Ancestors
The earliest known relatives of dinosaurs were the size of a house cat, walked on four legs and left footprints in the quarries in Poland.
The tracks, described in a report published Wednesday by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, push back the first appearance of this dinosaur lineage to about 250 million years ago.
“They are the oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage of any type anywhere in the world,” said Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University and lead author of the journal article.
The findings indicate that dinosaurs, which died out in a meteor impact 65 million years ago, originally arose to fill ecological niches opened by an earlier, even greater mass extinction.
“It’s definitely exciting,” said Sterling Nesbitt, a researcher at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. Dr. Nesbitt said that it was often hard to draw convincing conclusions about animals just from their footprints, but that Mr. Brusatte and his colleagues “put the best argument that anyone has ever put forth about early dinosaur tracks.” He added, “And I think they’re right.”
So far, no dinosaur bones have been found in the rocks, but “the possibilities are really exciting,” Mr. Brusatte said.
The earliest known bone fossils of an animal that fulfilled all of the criteria to be designated a true dinosaur date from about 230 million years ago. But dinosaurs were preceded by ancestors, including the ones that left the Polish footprints, that had similar characteristics and behavior.
“Anatomically, for all intents and purposes, it was a dinosaur,” Mr. Brusatte said. “If you saw this thing, you would call it a dinosaur.”
The dinosaur relatives were far less imposing than tyrannosaurs, triceratops and sauropods. But the dinosaurlike animals left distinctive, albeit small, dinosaurlike prints — three prominent middle digits bunched together — in the muddy plains. The animals had an unusual gait. As they walked, the back feet stepped in front of the shorter front legs.
For these earlier dinosaur cousins, scientists had previously dug up bones dating from 242 million years ago and had found footprints from about 247 million years ago.
The new footprints, uncovered over the past decade by Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki of the University of Warsaw at three quarries in the Holy Cross Mountains of central Poland, push back the lineage to within a couple of million years of the Permian-Triassic boundary, the largest extinction in Earth’s history.
“In geological terms, we now have the dinosaur lineage a blink of an eye after this extinction,” Mr. Brusatte said.
At the two older sites, evidence indicated that the dinosaur relatives all walked on four legs. But at a third site, dated at 246 million years ago, it appears the animals diversified to include larger ones that walked on two legs.
Nonetheless, they were all rare. Only 2 percent to 3 percent of the footprints at the sites were left by the dinosaur cousins, which were far outnumbered by lizards, amphibians and crocodilian reptiles. Only after another extinction 200 million years ago, which largely cleared out the crocodilians, did the age of dinosaurs begin.
A Seed Library for Heirloom Plants Thrives in the Hudson Valley
AS a child, Peg Lotvin used to watch her father, Hank, head out into his garden every fall on a mission. After setting aside part of the bean harvest for his neighbor Flossy, who was reputed to make the best baked beans in all of Ghent, in New York’s Hudson Valley, he would select the largest, heartiest beans from the crop and put them up to plant the next year.
More than 60 years later, Ms. Lotvin, the former director of the town library in Gardiner, N.Y., and others throughout the Northeast are still growing Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean. The preservation and propagation of the ghost-white bean have occurred thanks in part to a former colleague of Ms. Lotvin’s at the Gardiner Library named Ken Greene, who founded a group called the Hudson Valley Seed Library three years ago.
In structuring the venture, which aims to be a center for regional heirloom seeds, Mr. Greene chose the library model he knew well: the members of his group receive seeds each spring and then are encouraged to “return” the seeds from the mature plants in the fall.
It was also at the Gardiner Library that he first became concerned about biodiversity. “I checked out stacks and stacks of books about agriculture,” he said. In fact, Mr. Greene’s venture was born at his small-town library. It already lent fishing poles to residents, and Mr. Greene saw no reason not to do the same with seeds.
Two years ago, he left the Gardiner Library and began to devote himself to his seed venture full time.
Such groups are not common. There are only about a dozen seed-saving entities like Mr. Greene’s in the nation, said Bill McDorman, the president of one of them, Seeds Trust in Cornville, Ariz. These enterprises vary widely in age, size and formality, from the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, a multimillion-dollar group founded in 1975 by Mr. McDorman’s friend Kent Whealy, to the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, a grass-roots seed-swapping community in the San Francisco area that was begun just last May.
Members of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, who have grown from 60 at the start to nearly 700 now, pay a $20 annual fee for 10 seed packs of their choice. The library offers 130 heirloom plant varieties, 50 of which come from locally produced seeds like Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean. Mr. Greene has high hopes for replenishing those seed stocks this year. The long, dry summer provided ideal seed-saving weather, he said; last year, partly due to the wet, chilly summer, only 10 percent of members sent back seeds. He should know by the end of November if his hopes have been realized.
The mission of the library, Mr. Greene said, is “to collect New York heirlooms and the cultural stories that came with them.” As with other seed libraries, he also aims to encourage biodiversity, to offer an alternative to the genetically modified seeds produced by large corporations and to make money. (The library is a for-profit venture.)
Mr. Greene, 38, and his companion and business partner, Doug Muller, 31, typically grow about 60 to 70 different plants on the group’s two acres in Accord, N.Y., to keep current stocks strong and to discover new plants. “We are always experimenting and trying to push the envelope of what can be grown in the Northeast,” Mr. Greene said. This year, they grew sesame and cotton, as well as peanuts and amaranth, an ancient grain.
“We love when people give us seed from the farm of some kooky guy they know who lives on rutabagas and cabbage on the Cape,” he continued. For all anyone knows, such largely unknown seeds may yield hardy, productive and tasty plants that will have wide appeal.
It is now seed-saving season, and Mr. Greene and Mr. Muller, as usual, are doing the work by hand. Mr. Muller said that this year they saved seeds from about 30 to 50 of the 70 plants they grow, preserving only those that thrive and have the potential to become hardy regional heirlooms.
“To our chagrin, some of the plants don’t work out as well,” Mr. Muller said. “Last year, with the late blight, we only got seed from two varieties of tomatoes. But now we know those are more blight-resistant varieties: the New Yorker and the fox cherry tomato.”
The library gets help from 15 local farmers, who grow heirlooms for it. One of them, Erin Enouen, the manager of Second Wind Community Supported Agriculture in Gardiner, grew Long Island cheese pumpkins for the library last year, and is trying tomatillos this year.
“I’m getting higher quality plants and higher yields because they’re regionally adapted,” she said about the heirlooms the library nurtures. “One of the biggest benefits is that we don’t have to do extra work to get higher quality vegetables. As a grower, that’s really important.”
The library sells seeds online to the public, in two major categories: “library packs,” or seeds grown locally and by members, and “garden packs,” or heirloom seeds bought from wholesalers. By 2014, they hope, they will be able to sell only locally grown seed.
The library also markets 33 “art packs,” with packets designed by local artists. Margaret Roach, a former garden editor of Martha Stewart Living, was particularly drawn to the fox cherry tomato, which features a grinning cartoon fox flipping tomatoes on a grill.
“The designs were fresh and naughty and irreverent,” she said of the illustrated packets. “It wasn’t the ‘ye old seed company’ look.”
Neither Mr. Greene nor Mr. Muller, who met at a meditation retreat in 2005 in Barnet, Vt., has a background in farming; Mr. Greene holds a master’s degree in social work and Mr. Muller studied comparative literature. Their farm, part of 27 acres owned by Mr. Greene and three friends, also has a nonagricultural past. It was a Ukrainian summer camp in the late ’70s; dilapidated buildings dot the property, and Cyrillic letters hang over the doorways. The chapel, a cross still visible on the exterior, is now their workshop, and a former bunkhouse stores plants being processed for seed. Mr. Greene dreams of one day converting the old in-ground pool, with its chipped and cracked aqua paint, into a greenhouse.
Even at first glance, the repurposed fields do not resemble a conventional farm. Vegetables, left to grow until they produce seeds, are gigantic. Lettuce stands four feet tall with dandelionlike flowers at the tops. Parsnips, covered with flat clusters of small flowers, loom 5 feet high and 3 feet across.
“Growing seed is the farming behind the farming,” Mr. Greene said. “Most gardeners don’t see the whole life cycle of the plant because you’re interrupting it to eat the fruit when it’s the most delicious. This is a much more intimate view of the plant’s life cycle.”
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Greene’s group seeks to preserve the art of seed saving. He and Mr. Muller offer advice on the Web site and by e-mail. Methods vary widely from plant to plant. With arugula and broccoli seeds, the process is technical, requiring pressured air to separate seed from chaff, while with Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean, the seed saver just needs to bang the plant inside a trash bin.
Mr. Greene’s library is still small; by comparison, the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa boasts 25,000 varieties of heirloom seeds. But Sascha DuBrul, who founded the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library in California in 2000, said that, like his group, Mr. Greene’s has sociological importance because of its links to a major city. (About 40 percent of Hudson Valley members live in New York City.)
“An urban seed library,” Mr. DuBrul said, “is about the relationship between biological and cultural diversity, and people having a direct connection to the seeds that are growing their foods.”
That is a significant mission to add to Mr. Greene’s quests to enhance biodiversity and, more specifically, to enrich the store of heirloom plants in the Northeast. But Mr. Greene acknowledges that, personally, these very big goals have very small roots.
“I was a tiny child — really tiny — and I loved tiny things,” he said. “Seeds are a really powerful tiny thing.”
Done!
Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence.
Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day.
Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.
“For all the advances in computer science, we still don’t have a computer that can learn as humans do, cumulatively, over the long term,” said the team’s leader, Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist and chairman of the machine learning department.
The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”
NELL also learns facts that are relations between members of two categories. For example, Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts — even if it has never read that Mr. Manning plays for the Colts. “Plays for” is a relation, and there are 280 kinds of relations. The number of categories and relations has more than doubled since earlier this year, and will steadily expand.
The learned facts are continuously added to NELL’s growing database, which the researchers call a “knowledge base.” A larger pool of facts, Dr. Mitchell says, will help refine NELL’s learning algorithms so that it finds facts on the Web more accurately and more efficiently over time.
NELL is one project in a widening field of research and investment aimed at enabling computers to better understand the meaning of language. Many of these efforts tap the Web as a rich trove of text to assemble structured ontologies — formal descriptions of concepts and relationships — to help computers mimic human understanding. The ideal has been discussed for years, and more than a decade ago Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the underlying software for the World Wide Web, sketched his vision of a “semantic Web.”
Today, ever-faster computers, an explosion of Web data and improved software techniques are opening the door to rapid progress. Scientists at universities, government labs, Google, Microsoft, I.B.M. and elsewhere are pursuing breakthroughs, along somewhat different paths.
For example, I.B.M.’s “question answering” machine, Watson, shows remarkable semantic understanding in fields like history, literature and sports as it plays the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Google Squared, a research project at the Internet search giant, demonstrates ample grasp of semantic categories as it finds and presents information from around the Web on search topics like “U.S. presidents” and “cheeses.”
Still, artificial intelligence experts agree that the Carnegie Mellon approach is innovative. Many semantic learning systems, they note, are more passive learners, largely hand-crafted by human programmers, while NELL is highly automated. “What’s exciting and significant about it is the continuous learning, as if NELL is exercising curiosity on its own, with little human help,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, who leads a project called TextRunner, which reads the Web to extract facts.
Computers that understand language, experts say, promise a big payoff someday. The potential applications range from smarter search (supplying natural-language answers to search queries, not just links to Web pages) to virtual personal assistants that can reply to questions in specific disciplines or activities like health, education, travel and shopping.
“The technology is really maturing, and will increasingly be used to gain understanding,” said Alfred Spector, vice president of research for Google. “We’re on the verge now in this semantic world.”
With NELL, the researchers built a base of knowledge, seeding each kind of category or relation with 10 to 15 examples that are true. In the category for emotions, for example: “Anger is an emotion.” “Bliss is an emotion.” And about a dozen more.
Then NELL gets to work. Its tools include programs that extract and classify text phrases from the Web, programs that look for patterns and correlations, and programs that learn rules. For example, when the computer system reads the phrase “Pikes Peak,” it studies the structure — two words, each beginning with a capital letter, and the last word is Peak. That structure alone might make it probable that Pikes Peak is a mountain. But NELL also reads in several ways. It will mine for text phrases that surround Pikes Peak and similar noun phrases repeatedly. For example, “I climbed XXX.”
NELL, Dr. Mitchell explains, is designed to be able to grapple with words in different contexts, by deploying a hierarchy of rules to resolve ambiguity. This kind of nuanced judgment tends to flummox computers. “But as it turns out, a system like this works much better if you force it to learn many things, hundreds at once,” he said.
For example, the text-phrase structure “I climbed XXX” very often occurs with a mountain. But when NELL reads, “I climbed stairs,” it has previously learned with great certainty that “stairs” belongs to the category “building part.” “It self-corrects when it has more information, as it learns more,” Dr. Mitchell explained.
NELL, he says, is just getting under way, and its growing knowledge base of facts and relations is intended as a foundation for improving machine intelligence. Dr. Mitchell offers an example of the kind of knowledge NELL cannot manage today, but may someday. Take two similar sentences, he said. “The girl caught the butterfly with the spots.” And, “The girl caught the butterfly with the net.”
A human reader, he noted, inherently understands that girls hold nets, and girls are not usually spotted. So, in the first sentence, “spots” is associated with “butterfly,” and in the second, “net” with “girl.”
“That’s obvious to a person, but it’s not obvious to a computer,” Dr. Mitchell said. “So much of human language is background knowledge, knowledge accumulated over time. That’s where NELL is headed, and the challenge is how to get that knowledge.”
A helping hand from humans, occasionally, will be part of the answer. For the first six months, NELL ran unassisted. But the research team noticed that while it did well with most categories and relations, its accuracy on about one-fourth of them trailed well behind. Starting in June, the researchers began scanning each category and relation for about five minutes every two weeks. When they find blatant errors, they label and correct them, putting NELL’s learning engine back on track.
When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)
NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.
His ideal, Dr. Mitchell said, was a computer system that could learn continuously with no need for human assistance. “We’re not there yet,” he said. “But you and I don’t learn in isolation either.”
Spaghetti tacos, a more interesting article than it sounds
IT started as a gag: spaghetti tacos.
On an episode of the hit Nickelodeon series “iCarly,” the lead character’s eccentric older brother, Spencer, makes dinner one night. Glimpsed on screen, the dish consists of red-sauce-coated pasta stuffed into hard taco shells. What could be more unappealing?
When Julian Stuart-Burns, 8, asked his mother to make the tacos one night, she simply laughed. “I thought he was joking,” said Jennifer Burns, a Brooklyn mother of three. “But then he kept asking.”
Ms. Burns finally gave in — like thousands of other moms — and cooked up the punch line for Julian’s birthday party.
That punch line has now become part of American children’s cuisine, fostering a legion of imitators and improvisers across the country. Spurred on by reruns, Internet traffic, slumber parties and simple old-fashioned word of mouth among children, spaghetti tacos are all the rage. Especially if you’re less than 5 feet tall and live with your mother.
Mom blogs and cooking Web sites are filled with recipes from dozens of desperate parents who have been confronted with how to feed their offspring the popular gag. A Facebook page has sprung up with more than 1,200 fans.
There’s a dessert version, made with brownie mix, white frosting and strawberry preserves; a guacamole-covered version, with Mexican-flavored tomato sauce, at Barefoot Kitchen Witch, the Web site of the Rhode Island blogger Jayne Maker; and a recipe available at spaghettitacos.com that uses Italian sausage and peppers.
Ed Dzitko, a dad from Woodbury, Conn., uses oversize taco shells to fit in more spaghetti. Cheryl Trombetta, a grandmother from Secaucus, N.J., makes them whenever her 5-year-old grandson asks. A woman in Lincoln, Neb., posted a meat-sauce version on Food.com in the winter, crediting her 7-year-old son with the idea. And Karen Petersen, a mother of two from Rye, N.H., fries her own taco shells and breaks the spaghetti into thirds to make the strands fit more easily.
“Clearly, it’s spread like a virus,” said Ms. Petersen, a self-described “foodie,” who said that she has made them several times for her 11-year-old daughter, Amelia.
After seeing them on the show, Amelia was served the tacos at a friend’s slumber party this year and then begged her mom to make them.
“The mixture of spaghetti and tacos is odd,” Amelia admitted. “But it’s actually pretty good. They’re one of my favorite foods. I guess kids like making them because they think it’s cool to be like the people from ‘iCarly.’ ”
But the real reason, she said, is that “the taste is really, really good.”
For those who need to be brought up to speed, “iCarly” is about a teenage girl, raised by her brother, who creates a weekly show for the Web with her best friends. No one seems more surprised by the vast popularity of spaghetti tacos than the creator of “iCarly,” Dan Schneider, who invented the gag three years ago.
“It was just a little joke I came up with for one episode,” Mr. Schneider said. “Then it turned into a running joke. And now it’s this thing people actually do.”
For Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, the question is not why kids are asking for spaghetti tacos, but why they haven’t asked for them sooner.
“This combination seems to be an inevitability, sort of like chocolate and peanut butter running into each other on that Reese’s commercial,” he said. “The amazement should be only that it took ‘iCarly’ to bring it into our melting pot of a culture.”
“Spaghetti tacos has made it possible to eat spaghetti in your car,” he said. “It’s a very important technological development. You don’t even need a plate.”
Perhaps the nearest pop-culture equivalent — that is, a sitcom artifact that thrives in the real world — is Festivus, an alternative to Christmas introduced on a 1997 “Seinfeld” episode, Mr. Thompson said. Festivus now has a number of real adherents.
Mr. Schneider said he came up with the spaghetti taco idea while writing a first-season episode, broadcast on Nov. 10, 2007, in which Spencer finds himself in the kitchen. “Spencer’s an artist, a sculptor, he wears socks that light up,” Mr. Schneider explained. “So he’s not going to make a roast chicken for dinner.”
The joke resurfaced in five more episodes, but what pushed the dish onto the front burner of parental consciousness was an entire show devoted to it — a cook-off between Carly and a crazy chef named Ricky Flame — which was broadcast in September 2009.
Ms. Burns, the Brooklyn mom, was an early adopter, having made the tacos about three months after the dish was first mentioned.
“I had six boys coming over for dinner, and asked Julian what he wanted,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Spaghetti tacos.’ I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ ”
Julian, now 10, had never had them before and had never heard of anyone else making them besides Spencer and the cast of “iCarly.” “But I wanted them because they looked really delicious and fun to eat,” Julian said. “They’re really crunchy and they have my two favorite foods, spaghetti and tacos.”
Every kid at the party ate them, even Julian’s picky friend, Henry.
“P.B. & J., that’s the extent of this kid’s repertoire,” Ms. Burns said. “His mother was shocked.”
The boys, who have enjoyed them for the last three birthday celebrations, now compete to see who’ll eat the most. A boy named Jake won this year, with a record five spaghetti tacos. “I thought he was going to be sick,” Ms. Burns said.
The first time they made them, Ms. Burns’s husband cooked an elaborate homemade sauce. “But I said, that’s so unnecessary,” she said. “I’m not eating them.”
Now, Ms. Burns simply doctors a jar of tomato sauce.
Even Ms. Petersen, the New Hampshire mom who crisps up the tortillas to order, said she uses a prepackaged sauce.
“Hey, I’m frying the tacos,” she said, laughing.
Amelia will then use taco toppings for garnish: tomato, lettuce, onion. She hasn’t tried avocado yet, but she’s looking forward to it.
Often, Ms. Petersen will make the dish when Amelia has her friends over.
“They’ve been so influenced by the media,” she sighed. “They’ll make their own ‘iCarly’ show in her room and then come out and have the spaghetti tacos. It’s kind of a thing we do.”
The spaghetti taco phenomenon, Mr. Schneider said, actually fits with the Do Try This at Home spirit of “iCarly,” which encourages, and then uses, skits and bits made by the young people who are watching. That philosophy has now spread to the kitchen.
Some children bypass their parents altogether and make the dish themselves. Emma St. John, 10, of Montclair, N.J., has been making them since January, when she had them for the first time at a friend’s party.
She starts with a can of Red Pack tomato sauce and then adds “a little bit of this and a little bit of that”: chili powder, cinnamon, Singapore curry oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, oregano. Her parents help her warm the taco shells in the oven and boil the spaghetti, then she does the rest.
“Everyone likes it,” Emma said. Even her 13-year-old brother, Ethan. The first week of school, they ate spaghetti tacos five times. “It’s good for people to come home and have something to look forward to,” said her father, Allen.
Mr. Schneider, the writer, said he plans to have the “iCarly” cast to his house to make a batch in the next few months, so that he can tape it and post it on his YouTube account. He’s only had a low-calorie/low-fat version prepared by his wife, Lisa Lillien, whose Hungry Girl franchise appeals to weight-conscious snack-food lovers. “I’ve never tasted the real, real version.”
Cammie Ward Moise, a Houston mom who featured the tacos on her parenting site, Moms Material, under the heading “Crazy Dinner Night,” said she doesn’t just make them for her kids, but also enjoys them herself. Still, she adds: “It’s a great thing to make, especially when you’re having the food battles at home. It’s a fun way to get them excited about eating.”
Her children, Taylor, 11, and Myles, 9, love the dish, she said. “It’s something their idol is doing,” she said. “They love ‘iCarly’ and would probably eat anything the cast of the show ate.”
“Now,” Ms. Moise said, “we just have to get her to put broccoli in a taco.”
At Brooklyn High School Named for Murrow, the Television Studios Are Dark
Frankie Fidilio was collecting scrap metal for money in Brooklyn when the gleam of iron behind a school caught his eye. There were teetering stacks of old televisions, obsolete video transfer machines and clunky cassette recorders. Even a 250-pound stationary studio camera like something out of a museum.
A scrapper by trade, as well as a star in the reality show “Scrappers,” Mr. Fidilio called the custodian, who told him that the equipment was being junked and he was free to take it. “I was like, holy cow, this seems like a whole department,” Mr. Fidilio recalled telling him. “And he goes: ‘Yeah it is. They’re gone.’ ”
The ton and a half of metal Mr. Fidilio brought to the scrapyard in late June was just a sample of the dusty clutter in the now-decrepit television studio of a high school whose name was once synonymous with television: Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Brooklyn.
Anthony R. Lodico, the principal of Murrow, said the studio, where students had produced game shows, news segments and features and filmed student bands for decades, fell victim to budget cuts. He closed it in 2008 and told the custodian to start discarding the old equipment after a flood from a sink damaged some of it in June.
The fate of the studio shows how difficult it is to maintain an expensive program in a public school, especially one that is dependent on constantly changing technology. The school ended its regular public access television program in 2005, unable to keep up with the transition to digital. Mr. Lodico recently obtained a $110,000 city grant to see if he could transform the studio into a digital editing facility.
Television production never, in fact, merited a stand-alone department at Murrow, but for more than a generation of students who took the sequence of courses called TERM, or Television at Edward R. Murrow, to train for television careers, it might have seemed like one.
“Murrow was a magnet school, and the way it magnetized you was because it had really amazing facilities,” said Orrin Anderson, who graduated from the program in 1982 and now works in television as a video graphics artist and editor.
Murrow was founded in 1974 as a progressive high school that emphasized creativity, independence and the “communication arts.” When its television studios opened in the late 1970s, Mr. Anderson recalled, they had huge Hitachi color cameras and audio equipment that he once smuggled out of the building to record the Beastie Boys, founded in 1979 by a classmate, Adam Yauch.
English courses were named after the various shows hosted by Edward R. Murrow, like “Person to Person.” On those shows, Murrow, often clasping a cigarette, turned his glare on people and current events of the midcentury, memorably criticizing the conduct of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Murrow died in 1965 of lung cancer at 57.
Classes in law, Photoshop and digital music disappeared: an art computer lab resembles a tour of iMacs past. A bright spot is a working planetarium whose 30-year-old star projector still pivots perfectly under a white dome — the school just received a $150,000 grant to modernize it.
“It’s great we are named after Edward R. Murrow,” said Mr. Lodico, “but we want kids to be excited about a lot of things.”
The last teacher to run TERM, Yvonne Hanratty (now Massaro), persuaded ABC and other networks to donate modern equipment in the mid-1990s. She taught students to tape school plays, conduct roving interviews and produce a regular show on Brooklyn community access television, she recalled in an e-mail. But the digital revolution required yet another technology overhaul, for which the school lacked money.
There were also personal tensions. Ms. Massaro’s relationship with her supervisors soured after the 2004 retirement of the school’s founding principal, Saul Bruckner. By 2007, Mr. Lodico said, there were no longer enough students choosing her television courses to justify continuing them.
Ms. Massaro, who now teaches art at Murrow, has filed a lawsuit, claiming that the closing of the studio was part of a campaign of harassment against her, along with assigning her packed art classes with high percentages of special education students. Mr. Lodico denies the charges, and the city has moved to have the suit dismissed.
The high school, which has 4,000 students, is still considered one of Brooklyn’s best, and gets many more applicants than can attend. But it has been a struggle to maintain the emphasis on electives amid years of cuts; this year alone, it lost $1 million, or 4 percent of its operating budget.
Behind the locked door of the studio, now used for storage, are rows of ceiling-mounted Klieg lights and huge camera dollies pasted with NBC stickers. Strewn on the floor are copies of “The Heroic Truth,” a Murrow biography.
Another former studio has been repurposed into an English classroom; wires for lighting hang from the ceiling, and a control room serves as a vestibule.
Murrow still offers introductions to film and broadcasting, but there is a lighter emphasis on production, and students use their own cameras and home computers to shape their final projects, said Gary Ragovin, the teacher of one of the classes. Students who do not have a camera can share or do an alternative assignment, like scriptwriting.
“So far, it hasn’t been a problem,” he said.
Functioning television studios at high schools in the city are increasingly rare. Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx still has one, thanks to a $1 million grant from the City Council in 2003. But the mantle appears to have largely passed to a new generation of small schools that use mobile equipment and make film and television their animating purpose.
The Academy for Careers in Television and Film in Long Island City, Queens, for example, has one computer for each of its 320 students, a dozen video camera setups (each costing $3,000 to $4,000) and seven teachers with production experience. It just built a sound stage in a locker room. Some of the equipment came from a $400,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The school spends its money on faculty and equipment “and little else,” the principal, Mark Dunetz, said.
Maintaining the equipment, he said, “is a tremendously complex thing to do, and our goal is to put systems in place so that we won’t be overly dependent on one or two individuals, including me.”
Footprint Fossils Offer Earliest Evidence of Dinosaurs’ Ancestors
The earliest known relatives of dinosaurs were the size of a house cat, walked on four legs and left footprints in the quarries in Poland.
The tracks, described in a report published Wednesday by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, push back the first appearance of this dinosaur lineage to about 250 million years ago.
“They are the oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage of any type anywhere in the world,” said Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University and lead author of the journal article.
The findings indicate that dinosaurs, which died out in a meteor impact 65 million years ago, originally arose to fill ecological niches opened by an earlier, even greater mass extinction.
“It’s definitely exciting,” said Sterling Nesbitt, a researcher at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. Dr. Nesbitt said that it was often hard to draw convincing conclusions about animals just from their footprints, but that Mr. Brusatte and his colleagues “put the best argument that anyone has ever put forth about early dinosaur tracks.” He added, “And I think they’re right.”
So far, no dinosaur bones have been found in the rocks, but “the possibilities are really exciting,” Mr. Brusatte said.
The earliest known bone fossils of an animal that fulfilled all of the criteria to be designated a true dinosaur date from about 230 million years ago. But dinosaurs were preceded by ancestors, including the ones that left the Polish footprints, that had similar characteristics and behavior.
“Anatomically, for all intents and purposes, it was a dinosaur,” Mr. Brusatte said. “If you saw this thing, you would call it a dinosaur.”
The dinosaur relatives were far less imposing than tyrannosaurs, triceratops and sauropods. But the dinosaurlike animals left distinctive, albeit small, dinosaurlike prints — three prominent middle digits bunched together — in the muddy plains. The animals had an unusual gait. As they walked, the back feet stepped in front of the shorter front legs.
For these earlier dinosaur cousins, scientists had previously dug up bones dating from 242 million years ago and had found footprints from about 247 million years ago.
The new footprints, uncovered over the past decade by Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki of the University of Warsaw at three quarries in the Holy Cross Mountains of central Poland, push back the lineage to within a couple of million years of the Permian-Triassic boundary, the largest extinction in Earth’s history.
“In geological terms, we now have the dinosaur lineage a blink of an eye after this extinction,” Mr. Brusatte said.
At the two older sites, evidence indicated that the dinosaur relatives all walked on four legs. But at a third site, dated at 246 million years ago, it appears the animals diversified to include larger ones that walked on two legs.
Nonetheless, they were all rare. Only 2 percent to 3 percent of the footprints at the sites were left by the dinosaur cousins, which were far outnumbered by lizards, amphibians and crocodilian reptiles. Only after another extinction 200 million years ago, which largely cleared out the crocodilians, did the age of dinosaurs begin.
A Seed Library for Heirloom Plants Thrives in the Hudson Valley
AS a child, Peg Lotvin used to watch her father, Hank, head out into his garden every fall on a mission. After setting aside part of the bean harvest for his neighbor Flossy, who was reputed to make the best baked beans in all of Ghent, in New York’s Hudson Valley, he would select the largest, heartiest beans from the crop and put them up to plant the next year.
More than 60 years later, Ms. Lotvin, the former director of the town library in Gardiner, N.Y., and others throughout the Northeast are still growing Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean. The preservation and propagation of the ghost-white bean have occurred thanks in part to a former colleague of Ms. Lotvin’s at the Gardiner Library named Ken Greene, who founded a group called the Hudson Valley Seed Library three years ago.
In structuring the venture, which aims to be a center for regional heirloom seeds, Mr. Greene chose the library model he knew well: the members of his group receive seeds each spring and then are encouraged to “return” the seeds from the mature plants in the fall.
It was also at the Gardiner Library that he first became concerned about biodiversity. “I checked out stacks and stacks of books about agriculture,” he said. In fact, Mr. Greene’s venture was born at his small-town library. It already lent fishing poles to residents, and Mr. Greene saw no reason not to do the same with seeds.
Two years ago, he left the Gardiner Library and began to devote himself to his seed venture full time.
Such groups are not common. There are only about a dozen seed-saving entities like Mr. Greene’s in the nation, said Bill McDorman, the president of one of them, Seeds Trust in Cornville, Ariz. These enterprises vary widely in age, size and formality, from the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, a multimillion-dollar group founded in 1975 by Mr. McDorman’s friend Kent Whealy, to the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, a grass-roots seed-swapping community in the San Francisco area that was begun just last May.
Members of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, who have grown from 60 at the start to nearly 700 now, pay a $20 annual fee for 10 seed packs of their choice. The library offers 130 heirloom plant varieties, 50 of which come from locally produced seeds like Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean. Mr. Greene has high hopes for replenishing those seed stocks this year. The long, dry summer provided ideal seed-saving weather, he said; last year, partly due to the wet, chilly summer, only 10 percent of members sent back seeds. He should know by the end of November if his hopes have been realized.
The mission of the library, Mr. Greene said, is “to collect New York heirlooms and the cultural stories that came with them.” As with other seed libraries, he also aims to encourage biodiversity, to offer an alternative to the genetically modified seeds produced by large corporations and to make money. (The library is a for-profit venture.)
Mr. Greene, 38, and his companion and business partner, Doug Muller, 31, typically grow about 60 to 70 different plants on the group’s two acres in Accord, N.Y., to keep current stocks strong and to discover new plants. “We are always experimenting and trying to push the envelope of what can be grown in the Northeast,” Mr. Greene said. This year, they grew sesame and cotton, as well as peanuts and amaranth, an ancient grain.
“We love when people give us seed from the farm of some kooky guy they know who lives on rutabagas and cabbage on the Cape,” he continued. For all anyone knows, such largely unknown seeds may yield hardy, productive and tasty plants that will have wide appeal.
It is now seed-saving season, and Mr. Greene and Mr. Muller, as usual, are doing the work by hand. Mr. Muller said that this year they saved seeds from about 30 to 50 of the 70 plants they grow, preserving only those that thrive and have the potential to become hardy regional heirlooms.
“To our chagrin, some of the plants don’t work out as well,” Mr. Muller said. “Last year, with the late blight, we only got seed from two varieties of tomatoes. But now we know those are more blight-resistant varieties: the New Yorker and the fox cherry tomato.”
The library gets help from 15 local farmers, who grow heirlooms for it. One of them, Erin Enouen, the manager of Second Wind Community Supported Agriculture in Gardiner, grew Long Island cheese pumpkins for the library last year, and is trying tomatillos this year.
“I’m getting higher quality plants and higher yields because they’re regionally adapted,” she said about the heirlooms the library nurtures. “One of the biggest benefits is that we don’t have to do extra work to get higher quality vegetables. As a grower, that’s really important.”
The library sells seeds online to the public, in two major categories: “library packs,” or seeds grown locally and by members, and “garden packs,” or heirloom seeds bought from wholesalers. By 2014, they hope, they will be able to sell only locally grown seed.
The library also markets 33 “art packs,” with packets designed by local artists. Margaret Roach, a former garden editor of Martha Stewart Living, was particularly drawn to the fox cherry tomato, which features a grinning cartoon fox flipping tomatoes on a grill.
“The designs were fresh and naughty and irreverent,” she said of the illustrated packets. “It wasn’t the ‘ye old seed company’ look.”
Neither Mr. Greene nor Mr. Muller, who met at a meditation retreat in 2005 in Barnet, Vt., has a background in farming; Mr. Greene holds a master’s degree in social work and Mr. Muller studied comparative literature. Their farm, part of 27 acres owned by Mr. Greene and three friends, also has a nonagricultural past. It was a Ukrainian summer camp in the late ’70s; dilapidated buildings dot the property, and Cyrillic letters hang over the doorways. The chapel, a cross still visible on the exterior, is now their workshop, and a former bunkhouse stores plants being processed for seed. Mr. Greene dreams of one day converting the old in-ground pool, with its chipped and cracked aqua paint, into a greenhouse.
Even at first glance, the repurposed fields do not resemble a conventional farm. Vegetables, left to grow until they produce seeds, are gigantic. Lettuce stands four feet tall with dandelionlike flowers at the tops. Parsnips, covered with flat clusters of small flowers, loom 5 feet high and 3 feet across.
“Growing seed is the farming behind the farming,” Mr. Greene said. “Most gardeners don’t see the whole life cycle of the plant because you’re interrupting it to eat the fruit when it’s the most delicious. This is a much more intimate view of the plant’s life cycle.”
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Greene’s group seeks to preserve the art of seed saving. He and Mr. Muller offer advice on the Web site and by e-mail. Methods vary widely from plant to plant. With arugula and broccoli seeds, the process is technical, requiring pressured air to separate seed from chaff, while with Hank’s X-tra Special Baking Bean, the seed saver just needs to bang the plant inside a trash bin.
Mr. Greene’s library is still small; by comparison, the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa boasts 25,000 varieties of heirloom seeds. But Sascha DuBrul, who founded the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library in California in 2000, said that, like his group, Mr. Greene’s has sociological importance because of its links to a major city. (About 40 percent of Hudson Valley members live in New York City.)
“An urban seed library,” Mr. DuBrul said, “is about the relationship between biological and cultural diversity, and people having a direct connection to the seeds that are growing their foods.”
That is a significant mission to add to Mr. Greene’s quests to enhance biodiversity and, more specifically, to enrich the store of heirloom plants in the Northeast. But Mr. Greene acknowledges that, personally, these very big goals have very small roots.
“I was a tiny child — really tiny — and I loved tiny things,” he said. “Seeds are a really powerful tiny thing.”
Done!
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Date: 2010-10-08 08:11 pm (UTC)I save seeds, and this year I started breeding for early germination in cold, wet soils by planting some corn in March. Out of forty-two hills of corn, about a dozen have produced ears, which I will save and plant next March.
Secondary to my cold-and-wet-tolerant-corn is color: I want to breed an ear of white corn studded with multicolored kernels, like this beautiful pendant. (http://www.southwestindian.com/prod/White-Corn-Pendant.cfm)