From: smith-una@yale.edu (Una Smith)
Newsgroups: bionet.biology.tropical
Subject: Re: Is there anyone interested in tropical forest research?
Date: 29 Dec 1992 15:57:00 -0500
Organization: Yale University Science & Engineering UNIX(tm), New Haven, CT 06520-2158
NNTP-Posting-Host: minerva.cis.yale.edu
Summary: Article expirations, e-mail directory

In reply to a vague query recently, hantuo@utu.fi (Hanna Tuomisto) wrote:

>Sure, there are plenty of us working in the tropics, but everybody seems
>to be hiding in the woods at the moment [...]

It's Winter Vacation time for most people in the United States, especially
those in academia, who are between semesters now.


>Una, are you on the line? I'd like to make a few suggestions about this
>newsgoup. There have not been very many messages around lately, and
>therefore the newsbox has often been empty. But yet the turnover rate
>seems to be rather high, and when the messages only stay available for a
>short time, they may be missed by many people who only check the
>newsgroup occasionally. So I would like to know if it were possible to
>leave the messages in for a longer time?

For those readers who have e-mail subscriptions, I should explain that
Hanna is refering to Usenet, which is supported on the computer she
uses.  Because Usenet is an accumulation of several thousand newsgroups
(the number varies from place to place), and there are many megabytes
of new articles distributed world-wide each day, most system adminis-
trators "expire" articles after a set number of days, depending on how
much disk space is available for occupation by Usenet.

So the answer to Hanna's question is that she must either ask her
administrator to lengthen the expiration time for bionet newsgroups,
or make a habit of reading Usenet more freqently.  Or subscribe via
e-mail.  Most administrators will gladly extend the automatic expire
time for high-quality newsgroups.


>Another nice thing would be some
>kind of a permanently available list of people who have expressed their
>interest in this kind of communication, including their e-mail and postal
>addresses and perhaps a short note of main interests and research topics.
>Any comments on this?

I think the idea is excellent!  Would you care to take charge?  A number
of people have told me they'd like to get in touch with other tropical
biologists, and I have forwarded their addresses to other people I know.
It is not appropriate to put someone on a mailing list (or a list that could
be used for unwelcome mailings) without the explicit permission of that 
person.  So I have not posted my list of fellow tropical biologists:  I
leave it up to them to do so.  Hanna, if you would like to create a
mailing list, please invite people to send you their e-mail and surface
addresses.  You might want to advertize in sci.bio and the bigger
listserver mailing lists.  For an example of a well-developed, focussed
directory, see the list of plant taxonomists and botanists of other 
flavors maintained in the anonymous ftp archive on huh.harvard.edu.


>Some time ago Bill Lawrence wrote that he was interested in contacts with
>Amazonian ecologists. I'd be very interested in exchange of ideas, too,
>are you still around? 

I am on vacation.  ;-)

-- 

      Una Smith      Biology Department       smith-una@yale.edu
                     Yale University
                     New Haven, CT  06511