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I have a thought about the Meise herbarium...,...about their « living herbarium »...,...some of plants there come from Leopold II his garden:,"...they don’t specify it, but you can infer it from their signs"
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,,,...(how) Should they be exhibited ?
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,,...some of the plants are engineered or kept just there...,…the sansevira was even long thought to be extinct in the wild
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,,,..or cultivated to flourish the desks of Belgian civil servants
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,...about the creation of its herbarium...,...the basis of the Meise Collection is an herbarium of the plants from Brazil...,...Leopold II bought it to assess Brazil as a colony. But he chose Congo instead
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,,,...JSB Pohl contributed to it with 1479 specimens. He also brought back a pair of indigenous people.
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,,...most specimens were acquired when permission from local communities wasn’t required…,...this seems to change with frameworks such as the Nagoya Protocol and the convention on biological diversity
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,,,…and there does not seem to be project to give them back to the countries they were collected from
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But on the data of Meise…,...and their digital portal...,...the fields used to describe the specimens seem restrictive,"...there is no field for indigenous names, indigenous use or possible help that the collecter had when collecting the plant"
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,,,...is a plant collected or extracted ? What makes the difference ?
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,,...an interesting term is a « type specimen »…,"...the ‘type specimen‘, is the first descrition a specimen for western science. Meise has 63,652 type specimens."
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,,,...a type specimen cannot be living. The only way to make a type specimen of an endling is to kill it.
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,...and the content of the dataset…,...one of Meise’s expertise is coffee and they gather a lot of data about it…,...yet Coffee does not grow in Belgium
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,,,...an expertise they inherited from colonisation and that they can only sustain through their relationships with former colonies
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,,...the repartition of the samples is quite telling...,"...1,5 % of type specimen were collected in Belgium, 22 % in RDC, 18 % in Brazil"
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,,,...and mirrors the history of Botany
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I feel unease on classification...,...about the need for models…,...what is simple is always wrong. What is not is unusable. Paul Valéry 1942…,...it is the core problem of abstract reasoning
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,,,...but usable for who? And for what?
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,,"...all models are wrong, but some are useful...",...but are they really ?
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,,,"...it’s la carte et le territoire again, isn’t it ?"
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,...about modeling from observations…,...it seems that we are reducing plants to a few numbered characteristics…,...why not apply the same to humans ?
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,,,...is the practice of categorisation bad in itself ?
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,,"...a model is an abstraction, considering only a limited set of measurable properties…",...that’s a lot to consider
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,,,...we tend to forget that there is more to reality than this.
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There is something with the Iris Dataset,...its origin are troubling to say the least…,...it was first published in the Annals of Eugenics… Is it wrong to display it ?,
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,,...its creator was a fervent Eugenist… Should we still use it ?,
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,...species in this dataset are lineraly separable.. ,...which make classification algorithms reach perfect accuracy…,...this also explains why it is so popular in Machine Learning education.
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,,,...but the data in the world is seldom as simply separable and correlated as this.
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