A couple of my presentations (as of May 12, 08) have been featured on the front page of the SlideShare website. They have chosen a recent one I gave as part of the Voyage of Discovery lecture series at the NHM, and an old one on the Scratchpad project. After messing about with SlideShare and Google Docs I decided to opt for SlideShare.

Wow – I got an invite to Nature and O’Reilly’s Science Foo camp 2008! Without question my experiences last year led me to conclude that this was simply the best science gathering ever. To get reinvited back is a real honor. This unconference brings together people working on the bleeding edge of their fields, who are helping to define the future of science, art and technology. The eclectic mix of invitees dynamically build a schedule over the course of the meeting, which (as in previous years) is held over three days this August at Googleplex in Mountainview, CA. As George Dyson noted from last years experience, the resulting schedule presents you with "the impossible choice" of deciding which sessions to attend.

Roger Price, Kevin Johnson and Bob Dalgleish have done me the honor of naming a second new louse species after me. This compliments Neopsittaconirmus vincesmithi (suborder Ischnocera), which was named after me late last year from Bourke's parrot (Neopsephotus bourkii).

The complete proceedings of London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) have recently gone online. This fantastic website allows users to view the details of almost 200,000 criminal trials held at the court from 1674 to 1913. I have already spent several hours browsing the site! Since this digitization project has many parallels with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (a project to scan the literature describing all 1.8 million known species) I thought I’d compare the two:

Mid-April I attended the first review of the Encyclopedia of Life Biodiversity Informatics Group (BIG). This is the team based at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole that is charged with delivering the web component of the Encyclopedia of Life project. As a member of EOL’s Informatics Advisory Group (IAG) we were present to take stock of the bioinformatics component one year in to this ten-year project. The review culminated in report that highlights priorities for BIG in the coming months. Rod Page sets out the tone of this review inEOL’s official blog, and I hope that the full document will be publicly available soon. In the mean time here are a few personal impressions based on the major themes from the meeting:

This site is undergoing a much needed spring clean. I’m also linking in an a few new features from various Web apps I have been using over the past few months. Here is a list of the changes:

As part of the Scratchpad program of work, we have been using the Drupal “Panels” module as a mechanism to assists users in instantly building and curating content in their sites. The video below provides a quick overview of how we have been doing this:

The Encyclopedia of Life is here (well sort of). The lucky few who managed to get through the traffic are treated to 25 "exemplar" pages illustrating the type of content EOL aspires to get for all species; thirty thousand less detailed pages (thanks largely to FishBase); and a million stubs (courtesy of Species-2000). By chance I happened to be running a lecture and practical on launch day as part of the Natural History Museum's MSc course in taxonomy and biodiversity. The lab was on "Computerized Identification" and provided a perfect opportunity to get some feedback on the first release from 25 web savvy students . Because this was on the morning (GMT) of EOL's launch day, we had unfettered access to the site before America woke up and EOL's servers fell over.

As part of my consultative work for Research Information Networks (RIN), I recently came across proposals for the new “Research Excellence Framework” (REF). This is the successor to the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and will be gradually introduced between 2010 and 2014 to assess funding of research throughout UK higher education institutions. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) recently launched a consultation process on the REF proposal, and it is to this document this short essay refers:

The challenge of both developing functionality for the Scratchpads and telling users what we are doing is a hard one to manage. However, the balance has fallen too far toward the former recently. We (Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Dave Roberts, and myself) plan to make some major announcements about Scratchpad functionality in late January 2008, but in the mean time here is a brief (ish) summary of recent developments. Apologies for the length of what follows - as you can see, we’ve been busy…