‘Gus, don’t be the comma in Earth, Wind & Fire’

Fire in the Earth system.

Fire is a worldwide phenomenon that appears in the geological record soon after the appearance of terrestrial plants. Fire influences global ecosystem patterns and processes, including vegetation distribution and structure, the carbon cycle, and climate. Although humans and fire have always coexisted, our capacity to manage fire remains imperfect and may become more difficult in the future as c...

The impact of fire on the Late Paleozoic Earth system

Analyses of bulk petrographic data indicate that during the Late Paleozoic wildfires were more prevalent than at present. We propose that the development of fire systems through this interval was controlled predominantly by the elevated atmospheric oxygen concentration (p(O2)) that mass balance models predict prevailed. At higher levels of p(O2), increased fire activity would have rendered vege...

Gus Stadler

Comma checking in Danish

This paper describes research in using the Brill tagger (Brill 94,95) to learn to identify incorrect commas in Danish. Trained on a part-of-speech tagged corpus of 600,000 words, the system identifies incorrect commas with a precision of 91% and a recall of 77%. The system was developed by randomly inserting commas in a text, which were tagged as incorrect, while the original commas were tagged...

The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth

Humans and their ancestors are unique in being a fire-making species, but 'natural' (i.e. independent of humans) fires have an ancient, geological history on Earth. Natural fires have influenced biological evolution and global biogeochemical cycles, making fire integral to the functioning of some biomes. Globally, debate rages about the impact on ecosystems of prehistoric human-set fires, with ...