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IUSS vs STFC
Today’s obligatory pointer to the latest on the ongoing UK physics-funding crisis: the “Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills” committee has released a pretty scathing report, mostly slamming STFC’s handling of the situation (and refuting most of its arguments for how it got us into this mess to begin with). The BBC’s Today show had interviews…
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Invitations
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve managed to get hold of invitations to a few semi-private (semi-public?) beta versions of interesting bits of software. OK, they’re not for Royal Ascot or even a posh dinner party, but I have to take what I can get. So be prepared for some serious geekery — sorry. Evernote…
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New Planck HFI Logo
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This is the new logo for the Planck Surveyor satellite’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI). I kind of like the retro 60s hand-drawn feel (or is it Le Petit Prince?) but the juxtaposition of typefaces on the bottom is awful (and “Planck” should probably be more important than “HFI”).
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Science, Blogs, Web III: Science Blogging Conference
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In its continuing bid to take over all aspects of science communication, Nature magazine (or more properly, an alliance between Nature Network and the Royal Institution) will be hosting a European Science Blogging conference in August or September. Right now, however, I’m in Norway. In addition to discussing how we’re going to measure the CMB…
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Science, Blogs, Web II: iPhone ArXiv
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But not all the news on ScienceBlogs is bad: Dave Bacon reports that there is now access to the arXivvia the iPhone: http://arxiv.mobi has a very iPhone-ish interface, with easy access to the whole arXiv. (The arXiv is a freely-available repository of preprints and papers in astrophysics and many other scientific disciplines.) I wouldn’t want…
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Science, Blogs, Web I: Big Bang, Big Problem
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There’s a blog post about gender differences in scientific literacy over at The Intersection. And no doubt, it is a scary statement about our culture and educational system (in the US in this case, although I suspect the results would be similar elsewhere) that men uniformly score better than women. But (as other commenters have…
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STFC on Newsnight
I’ve been distracted from preparing a presentation trying to make the sure the UK (and, yes, our group at Imperial in particular) gets its fair share of the dwindling UK astrophysics budget: Newsnight has a pretty extensive package, filmed over the last few weeks, discussing the ongoing astrophysics funding issues. Most impressive was the strong…
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AstroGrid at NAM
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For the last decade, astronomers worldwide have slowly been bringing together the infrastructure to create a “Virtual Observatory” — uniform access to astronomy data from different telescopes, with different sorts of instruments, taken by different astronomers at different times. Very quickly in the process, astronomers realized that the main problems lay not in the underlying…
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Tales of the unexpected
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I’ve spent the last couple of days at a meeting of the STFC Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP). We evaluate all of the large project proposals (big telescopes, satellites, detectors for particle and nuclear physics) that are submitted to the funding council. Despite the still-unresolved crisis in STFC funding, projects are still being proposed, and…
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“How did you know I was a new yorker?”
I spent the weekend in Oxford celebrating a friend’s landmark birthday, running around the town’s lovely Port Meadow and talking about the topology of the Universe. I planned to take the Oxford Tube bus service back to London. “excuse me, did you know we weren’t stopping when we all got on the bus? Why didn’t…
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