Quick note about a tool I've cobbled together as part of the phyloinformatics course, which addresses a long standing need I and others have to extract specimen codes from text. I've had this code kicking around for a while (as part of various never-finished data mining projects), but never got around to releasing it, until now.

Vince Smith has produced a nice flyer for my forthcoming talk at The Natural History Museum on March 17th (11-12). It will be a busy day as I'm also talking at the British Library in the evening (6pm - 8:30pm), for which Sarah Kemmitt has produced a flyer, and set up a discussion forum on Nature Network. With all this effort going into the artwork, I'd better actually come up with something useful to say.

One of my pet peeves is how backward natural history museums are in grasping the possibilities the Internet raises. Most electronic displays in museums have low information content, and are doomed to obsolescence. Traditional media (plaques, labels) have limited space, and also date quickly.