Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge.

Last week I was at the NSF "Assembling, Visualising and Analysing the Tree of Life" Ideas Lab, run by KnowInnovation.com/. It was an interesting experience, essentially a structured week of brainstorming ideas.One thing I came away with is the feeling that our notions of the "tree of life" are fuzzy, contradictory, and often probably unobtainable.

As part of the NSF "Assembling, Visualising and Analysing the Tree of Life" Ideas Lab that I took part in earlier this week I had an assessment of my "problem solving style" carried out using a service called FourSight.

Quick post on a little tool I came across, moz-hocr-edit. This Firefox add-on lets you proofread Optical Character Recognition (OCR) output.

The talks from the 2001 workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi 2011) are now available on Vimeo. There were some great talks at VizBi, especially the keynotes (the "featured videos" on the Vimeo page for VizBi).My own (slightly breathless) talk was on phylogeny visualisation, which you can watch below. Visualization of phylogenetics &

I'm taking a virtual part in Mendeley's Hack4Knowledge event. I'm using this a chance to explore some ideas about building novel interfaces to bibliographic data in Mendeley. One idea is to display a user's entire library in one screen. I think the user interfaces employed by most bibliographic software are too conservative and there some cool things that could be done.

Prompted by the appearance on the BHL blog of an article about BioStor I've thinking about how to improve what is basically a fairly clunky tool.One major weakness is searching the collection of nearly 40,000 articles extracted from BHL. Note the word "extracted." BioStor isn't a tool like PubMed or Google Scholar where the goal is to find articles on a topic.

Inspired by the forthcoming Hack4Knowledge I've put together a service that enables you to assert that you are the author of a paper using the Mendeley API.If you are impatient, give it a try at: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/hack4knowledge/iwrotethat/To use it you need a Mendeley account. When you go to I wrote that you will be asked to connect to your Mendeley account.

I would like to know what you think of a grant proposal I plan to submit to the UK Natural Environment Research Council at the end of the month.

Last December I released a web site called Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB, which was part of my ongoing exploration of how to build a simple yet useful database of taxonomic names. In particular, I want to link names directly to the primary taxonomic literature.

My institute is going through various reviews of staff performance and, frankly, I'm feeling somewhat vulnerable given my somewhat unorthodox (at least amongst my colleagues) approach to doing science.