Category Science

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First steps towards a more coherent online natural history offer at the BBC

May 19, 09 11:32 PM

For the last five or so months I’ve been working on a new set of sites under the umbrella of “BBC Earth” — a programme of work aimed at giving everyone access to some of the best natural history content in the world. The project is made up of three complementary and interlinked projects, the first couple of which recently went live.

Out of the wild

Kakpo -- Out of the wild

The first site to go live, “Out of the Wild” aims to bring you a view on the natural world from the perspective of our crews while on location; a sort of “From our correspondent” for the natural world. The stories — a mix of short video clips, slideshows and text based stories — are all grouped around the expeditions, the people on location and the originating programmes. Our hope is that you will enjoy this more personal view of the natural world brought to you from some of the most amazing part of the world by the worlds best wildlife documentaries makers.

We then launched “Earth News” which does pretty much what is says on the tin — news about the natural world.

We’re both aggregating natural history news articles from elsewhere on the BBC news site as well as new articles (some unique) written for Earth News, such as the story of the adult king penguin which kidnapped a skua chick and then attempted to raise it.

The final part of BBC Earth will see us starting to open up the BBC archive in, what I hope, will be interesting and useful ways.

We then, of course, need to make all of this available in nice machine representation so that others can start to hack with the data.

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Interesting stuff from around the web 2009-02-04

Feb 4, 09 10:44 PM
Hippos are more closely related to their whale cousins than they (hippos) are to anything else

Hippos are more closely related to their whale cousins than they (hippos) are to anything else

Tree of Life – evolution interactive – Darwin 200 – Wellcome Trust
Want to know the concestor of two species then this is for you. And they have obviously spent time on the visual and interaction design and it’s great they have released it under a Creative Commons license. But, but because they haven’t provided URLs for each of the taxa it’s lost to the web, which is such a shame.

Google Latitude – see where you friends are in realtime [Google]
A service for sharing (primarily via your mobile phone) your location with friends and family and as such it’s similar to BrightKite and FireEagle. If Google integrate this into existing services, that is it becomes a service sat behind Google search and maps, then this could be a bit of a killer if only because that’s where people’s attention is. That said FireEagle is a generative location exchanging service.

How Twitter Was Born [140 Characters]
Interesting read about the birth and early days of Twitter.

Visualising our SVN commit history [whomwah]
Deeply cool.

Listen to Yourself [xkcd]
YouTube comments are a mess — this could the be answer, so might making the site about people and their videos rather than videos with some comments.

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Interesting stuff from around the web 2008-09-21

Sep 21, 08 9:56 PM
Eadward Muybridge’s 1878 investigation into whether horses’ feet were actually all off the ground at once during a trot.

Eadward Muybridge’s 1878 investigation into whether horses’ feet were actually all off the ground at once during a trot.

Born To Run – Human Evolution [DISCOVER Magazine]
Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet over long distances.

Prisoner’s Dilemma Visualisation [James Alliban]
Nice visualisation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a classic example of game theory) using Processing.

More Google news

Google Visualization API [Google Code]
The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations.

GAudi – Google’s new audio index [Official Google Blog]
It’s currently in Google Labs and is restricted to content from political sources but it still looks interesting. In addition to being able to search for terms you can also jump directly to the point in the video where the keyword is mentioned.

The social web: All about the small stuff [Official Google Blog]
The promise of the social web is about making it easy to share the small stuff – to make it effortless and rebuild that feeling of connectedness that comes from knowing the details.

More background on Matt’s hack: streaming content to iTunes

Things to do with /programmes #431: iTunes! [BBC Radio Labs]
Matt’s write up of his work on streaming iPlayer content through iTunes.

Very surprised the blog sphere hasn’t picked up on the implications of this hack but there you go.

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Interesting stuff from around the web 2008-09-01

Sep 1, 08 11:42 PM
Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Some Google news

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project [blogoscoped.com]
Built with WebKit but with added cool features – some UX stuff but more interestingly a new JavaScript virtual machine, multi-threading and sensible security policies. And all Open Sourced.

Google’s undocumented favicon to png convertor [via Simon Willison]
Showing the favicon of a domain next to a link is a really nice trick, but it’s slightly tricky to achieve as IE won’t display a .ico file if you link to it from an img element, so you need to convert the images server-side. This undocumented Google API does that for you, meaning it’s much easier to add favicons as a feature to your site.

Some cool hacking…

Solar powered ice maker [Hack a Day]
The system uses solar heat to facilitate evaporation of a coolant. When the sun goes down and the coolant turns back to liquid, its temperature drops drastically due to extreme pressure differences. The unit can produce 14 pounds of ice per day with zero carbon footprint.

Archrs – an everyday story of web development [BBC - Radio Labs]
Tristan’s review of his work on a new Archer’s prototype. Unfortunately it didn’t get launched – which is a real shame it would have been great.

And finally some project management stuff

The Need for Leadership in Scrum [NetObjectives]
An interesting take on the role of management and leadership within organisations using Scrum. Where leadership as the “ability to create a solid vision of a better future for those people he/she is leading.” A leader must have a compelling desire to move towards that vision. And management as the “ability to match people’s tasks with their skills.”

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Interesting stuff from around the web 2008-08-21

Aug 21, 08 10:59 PM

Tag on Tim Berners-Lee's original NeXT machine -- first Web server [by Robert Scoble Used under licence.]

"Tag on Tim Berners-Lee original NeXT machine - the first Web server" by Robert Scoble, used under licence

An ontology to modeling dynamic online presence [The Online Presence Project]
Having a presence ontology could be used to facilitate the integration of online presence data from various sources, or help in transferring data from one service to another. Interesting join to the Music Ontology.

MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) provides a Semantic Web framework to publish semantically-annotated content from free-tagging
It aims to solve this by providing a way for users to define meaning(s) of their tags using URIs of Semantic Web resources (such as URIs from dbpedia, geonames … or any knowledge base), and then annotate content with those URIs rather than free-text tags.

Wikipedia Miner lets you query Wikipedia to resolve terms to their relevant topics and navigate the categories and links that organize them
Wikipedia Miner is a toolkit for navigating and making use of the structure and content of Wikipedia. It aims to make it very easy for you to integrate Wikipedia’s content into your own applications.

‘Semantic Web at the BBC’ workshop [BBC Internet Blog]
Nice write up from Silver – including Michael and Matt’s ‘brief introduction to the semantic web’, Alex talking about MOAT and Dan Brickley considering how OpenID might fit in.

Music APIs – Yahoo! make theirs available and someone else starts to use the BBC’s

iPlayer Real Converter
Easy access to the BBC radios’ Real streams. Nice work and handy for those that like their audio via Real.

Y! Music Battle of the APIs in the Key of Ruby [Yahoo! Developer Network Blog]
Yahoo! release a RESTful API to Yahoo! Music. Limited to 5,000 requests per day and for non commercial use. Nice though.

Finally some more news on the LHC

CERN are going to start up the Large Hadron Collider – Here’s how It plans to stop it [IEEE Spectrum]
The experiment will hurtle two hair-thin beams of hundreds of trillions of protons around a ring-shaped accelerator at 99.99 percent the speed of light, each unimpeded beam is capable of melting a 500-kilogram block of copper. Since malfunction could lead to a catastrophic accident we should be thankfully CERN has spent nearly two decades devising an interlocking system of fail-safes.

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