"Manual of Central American Diptera, Volumes 1 and 2" edited by B. V. Brown et al. 2009-2010. [book review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
pages, $95 CAD.Like the common housefly, the newly published Manual of Central American Diptera (MCAD) is a curious beast that is best understood when put in context.Rather than being the product of spontaneous generation, this two-volume set is the culmination of a decade of writing, illustrating, and editing on the part of six editors and dozens of chapter authors.The current manual is the latest contribution to a long-term international collaboration on the part of dipterists.A three-volume Manual of Nearctic Diptera was published in 1981-1989 and Contributions to a Manual of Palaearctic Diptera was published in four volumes in 1997-2000.A multi-volume Afrotropical manual is in progress, with publication likely by 2020.The current work keeps in the spirit and format of these previous and future works.But why so much organized and concerted effort on flies of Central America?Firstly, flies are a hyperdiverse group of organisms.The currently described 153,000 species in Diptera represent about 10% of all described animal species.Despite this, most species of flies have yet to be formally described.As a comparison, there are as many described species in a single family of flies (Tachinidae) as there are in all of the Class Aves.And Tachinidae is not even the most speciose family in Diptera.Flies are found in every region of the world, in every microhabitat, and in every ecological niche.The tropical regions, especially the Neotropics, are the center of diversity for many families of flies.Central America holds many undescribed species, genera, and possibly even families of flies.Before delving headlong into cataloguing the diversity of flies in Central America, the MCAD first out-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.060 | 0.046 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".