I am sad to report that Nigel Hill, Medical Entomologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine died on the 5th January, 2010. The news is especially distressing given the recent death of Bob Dalgleish. Nigel worked on a wide range of insect pests including head lice. In particular, Nigel lead much of the recent research on the status of insecticide resistance in UK head louse populations. The news was passed on the me through Joanna Ibarra of Community Hygiene Concern who has written the following obituary which I copy here with her permission.

It is with great sadness that I have to note the passing of my friend and colleague Bob Dalgleish, who died suddenly on December 7th in San Diego following one of his many travels. Bob was a central figure in the Phthiraptera (louse) research community, first and foremost as a taxonomist, but also as a leader and organiser or international efforts to promote research on lice and taxonomy. Bob (with Steve Barker) was central to restarting the regular International Congress on Phthiraptera (ICP), more fondly known to us as the louse meetings, and helped establish the International Society of Phthirapterists to which he was eventually elected President.

I'm taking a trip to Montréal between December 5th and December 9th. GBIF Nodes Portal Toolkit (NPT) Workshop, Montreal, 7-8 December 2009

At long last we (the Scratchpad team) have got around to publishing a formal paper on the Scratchpads. There are several short notes and conference proceedings published about the work we have been doing, but this is the first technical paper that describes in details the overall architecture of the project and sets out the sociological model of what we are trying to achieve. The paper will appear as one of nine papers selected for a special series sponsored by the Encyclopedia of Life project, for the journal BMC Bioinformatics. BMC, with the help of the special issue editor Neil Sarkar, selected the Scratchpad paper to highlight the publication in a press release entitled "Darwin meets Facebook". You can find a copy of the press release attached to the bottom of this page.

For the past few weeks Dave Roberts and I have been beavering away on a major EU FP7 grant. The abbreviated name for our application is ViBRANT which is the catchier name for "Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy". The competitive nature of this call makes it difficult for me to say much about what we are planning or who is involved, suffice to say that the project is to extend and distribute the Scratchpads and integrate the activities of various other major European work programs including GBIF, PESI and the publisher of the journal Zookeys.

On Tuesday evening (27th Oct.) I went to a preview of the 2009 Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum. This year the exhibition has been moved to a new larger gallery, which makes it much easier to stand back from the crowds and enjoy the images. The photos are beautifully displayed as large backlit transparencies. Coupled with the low level blue lighting, which gives the space the appearance of a fancy wine bar, the exhibition is real treat.

I had the pleasure of visiting Cape Town recently for the second Diversitas Open Science Conference (OSC2). Diversitas is an organization that attempts to bridge that tricky divide between science policy and practice for Biodiversity science. To this end the conference brought together about 600 scientists and policy makers spanning various ends of  basic and applied biodiversity science. I was there to talk about the role infrastructures like the Scratchpad project can play in global biodiversity projects, as part of a session titled "global approaches to taxonomy and biodiversity research". The session was reasonably well attended, but with nine parallel sessions it was hard to make much of an impact.

Yesterday (18th Aug, 2009) I had two very different experiences dealing with queries about the licensing of images. The first was a query from paleontologist Mike Everhart, working at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas. Mike is working on a Pteranodon chapter in an upcoming book on pterosaurs and had discovered a photograph on Flickr of a Pteranodon specimen (AMNH FR7515) that I took during a recent visit to the American Museum of Natural History. Despite being on exhibit since the 1950s, it turns out the specimen had dropped out of the mainstream and has never been figured in a publication. By snapping the picture during  a hurried visit to the exhibits (after giving a talk) I’ve helped the specimen to be rediscovered. Mike was asking for permission to use the image on his Pteranodon website, as my snapshot is apparently better than a much older official image.

I have published a short invited paper in BMC Research Notes on the topic of data publication. The paper focuses on the challenge of making data publication a reality, as distinct from the publication of more traditional, synthetic papers that typically ghettoize data to the margins of traditional scholarly communication. I talk about the need to develop infrastructure, incentives and functionality required motivate the various stakeholders into publishing data.

Although it is almost one year away, preparations for the Fourth International Congress on Phthiraptera (ICP4) in Turkey are well underway. I have been involved in organizing the last three meetings (ICP2 in Brisbane, Australia 2002, and ICP3 in Buenos Aires, Argentina 2006) but this has to be the most organized we have ever been. This is due to Kosta Mumcuoglu and the local organizing committee who have done such a great job of pulling the meeting together. Here are a few more details: