What's New at MendelWeb

• Robert C. Olby's previously unpublished essay, "Mendel, Mendelism, and Genetics" has been added to the Essays and Commentary section. Olby is the author of several important works on Mendel (e.g. Olby 1979, Olby 1985), and I am very grateful to him for making this essay available to MendelWeb readers.
• "Heredity Before Mendel", the second chapter of Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist (Orel 1996), by the distinguished Mendel scholar Vitéslav Orel, has been added to the Essays and Commentary section. Orel's excellent biography was published last year by, and is currently available from, Oxford University Press, and it is an honor to have Orel's essay at MendelWeb.
• "In the Footsteps of Mendel", a wonderful account of a journey to Brno, in search of Mendel landmarks and memories, has been added to the Essays and Commentary section as well. The author is Margaret Peaslee, of the University of Pittsburgh at Titusville, and her essay includes photographs of Mendel's home, his portrait, his chair and walking stick, the Mendelianum, and even Mendel's biographer (Vitéslav Orel). I would like to thank Dr. Peaslee for sharing her trip and photographs with MendelWeb readers.
• A large number of links have been fixed, and added to, the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, in the MendelWeb Timeline. A new decade (1850-1859) has been added as well, but only 1850 contains a full set of links. I plan to post a fully linked version of that decade in early April; in the meantime, if you have suggestions about events or links please don't hesitate to send them along.
• The MendelWeb FAQ, the Reference Page, the Moo Information Page, and the MendelWeb Glossary have all been revised.
• Finally, and though it doesn't have much to do with Mendel, I've revised my homepage at Netspace, and added several recent photographs of Venice.

Edition 96.2 (August 6, 1996): Several documents have been edited and expanded (e.g. the MendelWeb Glossary and the Reference Page), but here are the major additions:

• Jan Sapp's excellent essay, "The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel," has been added to the Essays and Commentary section of MendelWeb. The essay first appeared in Experimental Inquiries, edited by H. E. Le Grand, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1990. The book is out of print, and remarkably difficult to find; I am grateful to Professor Sapp and Kluwer for making it available at MendelWeb.
• The MendelWeb archive now includes a version of the English translation of Mendel's paper in PDF format, thanks to Robert J. Robbins' wonderful Classic Papers in Genetics site.
• The Mendelroom at the Web-MOO known as Diversity University (login and type '@go #12766') now contains complete copies of both Mendel's original paper and the "Bateson" translation. You may find this especially useful if you use the Web Gateway at DU. If you have no idea what any of this is about, take a look at the MendelWeb Moo Information Page.
• The Statistics Calculation Page now allows you to calculate the variance and standard devitation of a data set, in addition to the mean, median and mode.
• The MendelWeb FAQ has been revised, and now includes an answer to the various questions I've received about citing MendelWeb.

Edition 96.1 (March 1, 1996): Here are the major additions:

• The Essays and Commentary section now includes "Mendel in America: Theory and Practice, 1900-1919," by Diane B. Paul and Barbara A. Kimmelman, which first appeared in The American Development of Biology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988; recently reprinted by, and currently available from, Rutgers University Press). This wonderful article from the field of science studies discusses the role of American agricultural concerns and practices in the reception and interpretation of Mendel's paper, at the time of its "rediscovery"; I'm very grateful to Professors Paul and Kimmelman, as well as UPP, for making it available at MendelWeb.
• A chapter about Measurement, from the textbook for "Theory and Practice of Science" is now at MendelWeb, with excellent discussions of scales and the concept of a mathematical model. As the Presidential primaries in the U.S. are underway, you might also wish to read the section that discusses voting paradoxes.
• I have added an interactive Statistics Calculation Page. This form allows you to compute means, medians and modes on your own sets of numerical data.
• With the re-publication of "Ex Libris" in the Journal of College Science Teaching, I have added some comments and corrections, as hyperlinks, to the version of the published article at MendelWeb.
• The MendelWeb Reference Page has been updated to include links to a number of genetics and botany sites, and the search engine section has been expanded as well.

• I have added a new decade (1840-1849) and updated all the pages in the MendelWeb Timeline.I have also started a page with links to other sites that are accessed by documents in MendelWeb.
• A copy of "Ex Libris", the essay that appeared in the September/October 1995 issue of The Sciences is now available here. The original version is still here as well.
• The list of recent journal articles concerning Mendel and his work has been expanded and put into html.
• To celebrate the opening of the Web Gateway at Diversity University, I have rewritten the Moo Information Page and added a hyperlink to MendelWeb in the Mendelroom at DU. Note that the Mendelroom at BioMOO, which has a Web Gateway as well, already contains such a link.
• I've revised Blumberg's Homepage, which now contains a number of links to science, and history of science WWW sites, as well as Web information sources.

Edition 95.2 (October 1, 1995): Many of the documents have been corrected and revised, but here are some of the major changes:

• A new Essays and Commentary section begins at MendelWeb with the 1992 paper by Hartl and Orel, "What Did Mendel Think He Discovered?". The essay, which first appeared in Genetics 131: 245-53 (1992), is an excellent introduction to many of the historical controversies surrounding Mendel's work. My thanks to Dr. Hartl and Genetics for permission to make this essay available to MendelWeb readers.
• The MendelWeb Moo Information Page has been revised. The first version didn't seem to produce many visits to the Mendelroom, and I hope I've improved the directions and explanations. There has also been a change in the evolving Web-Moo system at the BioMOO, which will now allow you to "see" the inside of the Mendelroom without logging into the Moo. See the page for details.
• The MendelWeb Reference Page now contains a link to a list of articles, published between 1965 and 1995, that concern historical, statistical, pedagogical and scientific aspects of Mendel and his work. The link can be found in the "Search Results and Search Engines" section.
• The MendelWeb Bibliography now contains references not only to the papers by deVries, Correns and Tschermak, but to the English translations of those works.
• The MendelWeb Collaborative Hypertext Homepage now shows which sections of the paper have been annotated by MendelWeb users (not many, as of this writing). If you are teaching or studying Mendel's paper, and/or have commentary or questions to contribute to the collaborative texts, please don't hesitate to make a link.