Just a brief thought prompted by two, partly related, things streaming past my nose. Firstly Michael Nielsen discussed the views of Aristotle and Sunstein on collective intelligence. The thing that caught my attention was the idea that deliberation can make can make group functioning worse, leading to a collective decision that is muddled rather than actually identifying the best answer presented by members of the community.

In case I forget how to do this, and as an example of how easy it is to get sucked into a black hole of programming micro-details, I spent a hour or more trying to figure out how to handle Japanese characters. I'm building a database of publications linked to taxonomic names, and I'm interested in linking to electronic versions of those publications.