Well, there were a large number of specific outcomes from Neuroinformatics 2008, most of which I won’t bore you with. The best idea, though, came out as piece of humour. I was ranting (yes, I know, it’s hard to believe) about public understanding of science. I’m a bit fan of this because I think that as scientists we should be able to write about what we do clearly and at a level suitable for an intelligent but uninformed individual. Of course, I believe this because in Neuroinformatics, this covers me; I don’t know much about brains, just computers and biology.

The suggestion was that, to every scientific paper we publish, scientists would be forced to add an explanatory paragraph; now, as I say, this was meant as a joke, but I think it’s a great idea. It is the beginning of term, so it’s going to take a while, but I intend to do exactly this; I shall add explanations to my publications page for each of my papers. I’m slightly worried about this, of course; it’s a well-known secret but, like many scientists, I don’t actually know what all of my papers are about; some of them were written by other people, some of them were written by me so long ago that I was "other people". So, I might even learn something in the process.

I shall announce releases here; the world will, no doubt, hold it’s breath till it turns up.

Originally published on my old blog site.