Well, not Darwin himself, exactly. The Evolution Directory (better known as "EvolDir") is a mailing list run by Brian Golding at McMaster University, Ontario.

One problem I've encountered in building a bibliographic database is the different ways author names are written. For example, for papers I've authored my name may be written as "Roderic D. M. Page" or "R. D. M. Page". Googling about this problem I came across Dror Feitelson's paper On identifying name equivalences in digital libraries.

Yes, I know this is ultimately a case of the "genius of and", but the more I play with the Semantic Mediawiki extension the more I think this is going to be the most productive way forward. I've had numerous conversations with Vince Smith about this. Vince and colleagues at the NHM have been doing a lot of work on "Scratchpads" -- Drupal based webs sites that tend to be taxon-focussed.

Test of google-code-prettify:class Voila {public: // Voila static const string VOILA = "Voila"; // will not interfere with embedded tags.}

I learnt today that my Elsevier Challenge entry didn't make the final cut. This wasn't unexpected. In the interests of "open science" (blame Paulo Nuin) here is the feedback I received from the judges:I think this is a pretty fair evaluation of my entry. I was making a case for what could be done, rather than providing a specific bit of kit that could make this happen right now.

One advantage of flying to the US is the chance to do some reading. At Newark (EWR) I picked up Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check", which is a fun read. You can get a flavour of the book from this presentation Guy gave in 2006. While at MIT for the Elsevier Challenge I was browsing in the MIT book shop and stumbled across "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" by Frenchman Jean-Noël Jeanneney. It's, um, very French.

Stata Center. MITOriginally uploaded by Roderic PageQuick post about the Elsevier Challenge, which took place yesterday in the wonderful Stata Center at MIT. It was a great experience.

I'm in the US on UK time, so this is probably a bad idea to write this, but the paper by Malte Ebach et al. ("O Cladistics, Where Art Thou?", doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2008.00225.x) in the latest Cladistics just annoys me too much.

The latest post on the EOL blog (Biodiversity in a rapidly changing world) really, really annoys me. It claims thatNope, I suggest it demonstrates just how limited EOL is. If I view the page for the red lionfish I get an out of date map from GBIF that shows a very limited distribution, and doesn't show the introductions in Florida and the Bahamas (I have to wade through text to find reference to the Florida introduction, and the page doesn't

The Science Commons has released a short video by Jesse Dylan, who made the Yes We Can video.