First, a query. Since last night, a whole heap of spam has been getting through Akismet. Those spam comments with many links have been caught in the WordPress moderation queue, but comments without URLs aren’t getting caught. Is anybody else having this problem?

I’m also struggling with a really slow network connection at the office today. This comes at a bad time, too, because my top two priorities are plowing through the immune-system literature and editing the conference book for ICCS 2007. Downloading journal-article PDFs at 1.1 Kbps is not fun.

And speaking of ICCS 2007 — that’s the seventh annual International Conference on Complex Systems — I’m going to be running around the Quincy Marriott next week, taking pictures and videotaping talks and generally doing conference stuff. I’ve generally kept my blog-writing separate from my work at NECSI (since nobody pays me to explain random spatial networks or protein structures, just to generate inscrutable graphs and equations about them) but I thought it might be interesting to try liveblogging the conference. Assuming I don’t have too many actual responsibilities, I’ll try to get synopses up here about the plenary speeches and the more interesting “breakout” talks.

This is probably a good time to state a disclaimer I will repeat later: anything I say here, whether in an ICCS liveblogging post or any other, is my own opinion and not that of my colleagues or employer.