Well, I am not sure that my brain wave on conductance worked quite as well as I had hoped. Can't win them all.

I've been playing with Connotea which is an online reference manager, with added social networking. It's quite cute actually. The basic idea is sound enough, the interface reasonable. It allows commenting and you can look at other peoples stuff also. But it would be a hell of a lot better if it worked all the time. It seems to fail on a lot of DOIs, doesn't seem to work on pubmed as it is advertised to do, and can't work at all with sites that it doesn't know — you would have thought that some heuristics would do the trick for most pages. After all, it works for Google scholar.

Spent a large part of this week arguing about conductance and how to model it ontologically, with Pierre Grenon one of the authors of BFO. The basic scenario is a membrane — is conductance a property of the ions travelling through it or the membrane?

I won't repeat the argument here, but I had a blinding flash of light last night and realised what the solution was, which I shall post tommorrow. I even know how I would represent the solution in an OWL ontology. How this maps to BFO, I have no idea, and I'll be interested to find out how it works.

It's been an interesting discussion; I am still rather sceptical about BFO, largely on the grounds of its supposed "realism". I don't understand this. Claiming to be representing reality appears to me to be rather arrogant and, essentially, faith based. Worse, I can't see clear criteria for determining whether something is real or not. Is a the notion of a dimension real or not? Or does it depend on whether they are representing space and time or something else? I can't see it. More over, if you insist of representing "universals" rather than concepts, I don't think that you are can represent multiple (potentially contradictory) descriptions of the same observations; in short, you deny the possibility of an extra layer of abstraction, which I think that you need.

Having said all of this, I've enjoyed the discusson with Pierre. It's been hard at times, and we've worked through the example slowly. He's seems to be a nice chap. This seems like a good thing to me. I'd like to understand the realist position better than I do, and it's nice to find someone who I can talk with discursively, even when I am rather dubious about their technical position.

Spent today fiddling around with Je-S. This is the web portal that a number of the research councils use to submit grants.

It's a delightfully baroque and obscure piece of software. They appear to have worked very hard at the usability aspects — it would have been hard to make a system this unusable by random chance.

The system stores a grant in a two deep hierarchy with a small amount of information at the bottom of each. The end result of this is that you have to click down, then up, then down, then up to find out anything at all about exactly what is in the grant.

They also have this fabulous system for logins. Basically, if you login, and then don't do anything for 20 minutes, Je-S will automatically log you out. This would be minorly irritated. The designers clear thought that this wasn't good enough, so as well as loging out, it locks the entire system for another 20 minutes preventing you from loging back in. When it does this it tells you:

"This account is already in use. Please ensure other browser sessions are properly logged out before attempting to log in."

It clearly knows that you are not logged in because it logged you out, but obviously telling what you have actually done would be too much like hard work.

The whole idea of the portal is really good; we used to have to submit kilos of paperwork by post in quadruplicate. It's amazing that some software engineers could take such a perfectly good idea and completely strangle it. They appear to have managed to make a user interface which is SO bad, that you hunger for the days of word docs and print-outs.

Just watched the last of the second season of Hamish Macbeth. I won't say what happens as I know Dan reads these pages sometimes; he loved the previous DVD which I introduced him to, and I can't spoil the surprise. Two episodes in a row. And like before, they had me in tears. Fantastic stuff.

It's midnight now, and I'm away for easter. I promised to not take a computer with me. I'm left with no choice. So, I better stop typing and watch the last episode of the season. The thumbnail has Lachie jr, dressing up in drag, so I guess it's a funny one.

Staying in the Swan Hotel last night in Harrogate. Temperature was a bit hot but an open windows cooled it down okay. The rooms are really quite small — the bathroom is particularly strange. The loo is hidden at the far end, with a wall in the way which has means that to get to the loo I actually have to walk through the gap sideways. A bigger person might not actually fit.

Yeah, this isn't an April fool. It's Sunday, and I am working. Today is the kick-off meeting for the CARMEN project, and tomorrow we move into the British Neurosciences Association meeting. I've never been to a neurosciences meeting so I am looking forward to it. We've spent the last few days getting a demo working for it, which has been fairly stressful — as demos tend to be — but we got it working in the end.

One of the recurrent themes, that I've heard before within CARMEN, is that people are more than willing to give us their data; if so, it will run counter of many of my expectations. In general, getting anyone to provide data and sane metadata is a hard task; I really hope this works straight-forwardly within CARMEN, and that I am proved wrong.