Quick note to say how much I like the programmers' Q & A site Stack Overflow. I've only asked two questions, but the responses have been rapid and useful. I found out about Stack Overflow by listening to the Stack Overflow podcast episodes on IT Conversations (which carry a lot of other podcasts as well).For a wannabe geek, these podcasts are a great source of ideas.

Among the many weaknesses of my challenge demo is the way it simply dumps out a list of sequences (see comments on the demo.

I've submitted my entry for the Elsevier Grand Challenge. The paper describing the entry is available from Nature Precedings (doi:10.1038/npre.2008.2579.1). The web site demo is at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/challenge/www/. I'm now officially knackered.

One byproduct of playing with the Challenge Demo is that I come across some rather surprising results.

I've put the my Elsevier Challenge demo online. I'm still loading data into it, so it will grow over the next day or so. There's also the small matter of writing a paper on what's under the hood of the demo. Feel free to leave comments on the demo home page.For some example of what the project does, take a look at Mitochondrial paraphyly in a polymorphic poison frog species (Dendrobatidae;

One of the things I've struggled with most in putting together a web site for the challenge is how to summarise that taxonomic content of a study. Initially I was playing with showing a subtree of the NCBI taxonomy, highlighting the taxa in the study. But this assumes the user is familiar with the scientific names of most of life. I really wanted something that tells you "at a glance" what the study is about.

Elsevier have released this video about the challenge, featuring a few of the contestants. I couldn't get my act together in time to send anything useful, and having seen the 16 gigabytes song (full version here), I'm glad I didn't -- there's just no way I could compete with Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie.

One of the judges for the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest is Andrew Perry, whose blog has some posts on Noel O'Boyle's OpenRef idea (see DOI or DOH? Proposal for a RESTful unique identifier for papers). Andrew discusses some implementations he has come up with, and compares OpenRef with OpenURL.

Chris Freeland's tweet alterted me to the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest:Elsevier are clearly looking for ideas (they also have their Grand Challenge), and there's been some interesting commentary on the Article 2.0 contest.The site provides some sample applications (written in XQuery), which you can play with by going to the list of journals that are included in the challenge and clicking down through volume and issue until you get to individual

Watch CBS Videos OnlineCBS News Sunday Morning Segment on the EOL. All fun stuff (Paddy skewering the interviewer who fails to recognise an echidna), but still long on promises and short on actual product.