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…

Over the years I have picked up multiple e-mail addresses from various institutions and organizations. I’ve kept these active on the principle that the mail client I use should be able to handle these changes more seamlessly than the people who write to me. However, this assumption has been heavily challenged this year. Coupled with the fact that my preferred address (a Yahoo pop account) has recently become painfully slow, I have decided to have an e-mail rethink!

The old server running this site (and a louse Specimen Image Database - SID) finally shuffled off this mortal coil. After a succession of power cuts and relocations in the Glasgow Lab where it was based, the server gave a last gasp of activity in late November, before moving on to the great recycling bin in the sky.

Single Sign On (SSO) has become an issue in a project I am working on, so I thought I’d say a few words on this here, lest I keep repeating myself. For the uninitiated SSO is a method of decentralized access control that enables a user to identify themselves with a common piece of information, and gain access to multiple SSO enabled resources. On top of these systems, trust mechanisms can be built that authorize particular sets of users to access particular set of resources. As is widely discussed elsewhere, identity and trust are two separate issues when it comes to authentication. Trust first requires identity, although the two are often conflated. SSO is advantageous because it helps eliminate password fatigue, the problem of having multiple passwords for different resources. SSO is also potentially more secure, and makes for a better user experience.

Two friends and colleagues (Kevin Johnson and Roger Price) recently described and named a new parrot louse species in my honour. The louse (Neopsittaconirmus vincesmithi) was described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington. This paper includes descriptions of two other species named after friends from the University of Utah (Sarah Bush and Dale Clayton). It is humbling to note that whatever I achieve for the rest of my career, my most enduring academic legacy may be this louse! My name (even if the species is subsequently synonymized) will be immortalized in the species description, along with the accompanying illustrations, specimens and metadata for perpetuity.

EOL endorses intelligent design. This is one of the messages a naive reader might take from reading an interview with Paddy Patterson in this weeks Nature. Paddy is one of the architects of the Encyclopedia of Life project, and is leading the development of EOL’s informatics infrastructure. Of course, EOL does not endorse intelligent design, or any particular viewpoint for that matter. Paddy’s message is that EOL will allow people to create a customized view of the Encyclopedia that can be censored not offend the sensibilities of particular groups of users. Unfortunately I am not sure most of EOL’s potential contributors will see it this way.