A question comes up quite consistently when I discuss Darwin@Home in the scientific community, and it centers around the extra effort I'm putting in to make the software available and really accessible to everybody out there on the internet. Scientists tend to rarely give user interface issues much attention because they're more concerned about publishing their results.

Publish or perish is fortunately not a description of my predicament. Since Darwin@Home is all about having lots of people help along from their home PCs by evolving things, much of my attention goes to user interface. It's not available yet, but my new version is all about having people make choices which guide the evolution. I'd love to see lots of participation, and hopefully it will spark the interest of some ambitious kid (or grad student) who wants to build something on the basis of my work.

The really unfortunate thing is the amount of really interesting projects that academics are doing all over the world but that never see the light of day outside a really small community of their own kind. Lots of things could be polished up and released to interest people who might be inspired.

I guess I prefer that a lot of people have a chance at a little inspiration on the issue of evolution, above having a small group of experts read many pages of analysis.