Came across Microsoft's announcement of a "A planetary computer for a sustainable future through the power of AI", complete with a glossy video featuring Lucas Joppa @lucasjoppa (see also @Microsoft_Green and #AIforEarth). On the one hand it's great to see super smart people with lots of resources tackling important questions, but it's hard not to escape the feeling that this is the classic technology company approach of framing difficult

Despite the well deserved scepticism about dashboards voiced by Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern (see Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard, I discovered this by reading Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning by Leigh Dodds @ldodds) I'm intrigued by the idea a dashboard for biodiversity. We could have several different kinds of information, displayed in a single place.

Benoît Fontaine et al. recently published a study concluding that average lag time between a species being discovered and subsequently described is 21 years. The paper concludes: This is a conclusion that merits more investigation, especially as the title of the paper suggests there is an appalling lack of efficiency (or resources) in the way we decsribe biodiversity.