Today (July 1st 2008) marks an important anniversary – the 150th birthday of the first public announcement on natural selection. On July 1st 1858 Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker read out an essay by Alfred Russell Wallace and two unpublished excerpts from Charles Darwin’s writings at meeting of the Linnean Society of London. One month later these documents were published together in the Society's journal. To mark this seminal event in the history of biology, my friend and colleague George Beccaloni has written an essay that outlines the background to this discovery and some of the controversy that followed. The definitive version of this essay is available from the Wallace Fund website, but George has allowed me to post a copy here.

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 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:

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.

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.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I spent that last 2 weeks in the US, catching up with various friends and colleagues I am collaborating with in Woods Hole and San Diego. My trip culminated in SciFoo ’07, at Googleplex in Mountain View, California – a 3-day science fest organized by Nature and O'Reilly, and hosted by Google. The “unconference” comprised of 200+ invited scientists, techno-geeks, entrepreneurs, artists and writers who are using science and technology to change the world. SciFoo has no predefined agenda; instead attendees collaboratively create one during the first evening of the event. There are numerous accounts of what happened at SciFoo ’07 (just Google SciFoo, or check out the blog posts on Technorati and the pictures on Flickr). Here are a few personal highlights:

Last week I ran a session at SciFoo Camp entitled “Biodiversity on the web”. I had originally planned to talk about some web-based environments (Scratchpads) we have created at the NHM to help biologists get their taxonomic research online, and the implications of this for science publishing. However, I bottled on my original talk (Science publishing for the MySpace generation: MySpecies and the Encyclopedia of Life), which was too long and obscure for most of the people that showed up.

As promised in an earlier post, find below my comments regarding the "provisional findings" of a review about the Research Information Network (RIN)- an organization established in 2005 to lead and co-ordinate the provision of research information in the UK.

The Research Information Network (RIN) was set up in 2005 to lead and co-ordinate the provision of research information in the UK. It is a lean organization with just 4 staff members, and is funded by a consortium of UK sponsors that include the UK Higher Education bodies, National Libraries, and Research Councils.