Politics
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Science is Vital
I don’t suppose that there are many readers of this blog who are not aware of the Science Is Vital campaign for the support of UK science, but just in case: in response to the likelihood of continuing cuts to the UK science budget as spun by business secretary Vince Cable, we in the science…
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“Public Service Review”?
A few months ago, I received a call from someone at the “Public Service Review”, supposedly a glossy magazine distributed to UK policymakers and influencers of various stripes. The gentleman on the line said that he was looking for someone to write an article for his magazine giving an example of what sort of space-related…
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Science: Commercially Useful or Theoretically Outstanding?
Today was the next drip in the ongoing water torture that is the upshot of the government’s funding cuts on UK science: BIS Minister Vince Cable gave the coalition government’s first major speech on science. Rumors have been flying around of cuts of 20-30%, and we have been searching for any hints of the Government’s…
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Training Scientists: What’s the Point?
My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain. But pretty often I get…
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Secular or Sinister?
I first encountered Cristina Odone as one of the more strident contributors to the BBC Radio 4 Today Show‘s “Thought for the day“, a daily three-minute slot inexplicably (to me) handed over to some religious believer. In her blog post for the Telegraph today, however, Odone has opened up an ad hominem attack on the…
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Debating UK Science, Live and on the Net
Many different strands of the discussion of the UK science budget are coming together, starting with last week’s announcement of STFC‘s restructuring. This week the Royal Society released its report, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity“, arguing that this is a crucial time to emphasize and invest in science, rather than pull away from…
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Some — not enough? — help for the STFC
The latest act in the black comedy which is the running of the Science and Technology Funding Council is being played out. The Science Minister, Lord Drayson (which sounds, with “science”, “minister” and “lord” all in one title, to my US ears more like a character from bad science fiction than an actual member of…
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Climate Change: Who Should I Believe?
Today I went to a talk by Chris Rapley, a Professor at UCL and currently director of the Science Museum in London (across the quad from Imperial), “Climate Change: Who Should I Believe?”. In a department full of academic scientists (including a few working on the climate, such as our head of department, Professor Jo…
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Cuts
I presume that anyone reading this blog knows that today is the day when the great unwashed masses of UK Astronomers heard about our financial fate from the STFC, the small arm of the UK government responsible for Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics. For various reasons, some clear and others manifestly not, STFC is…
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Obligatory post on climate change
The Institute of Physics is weighing in on the issue of climate change, so I thought I would take the opportunity to try to dumb things down as much as possible. The basic science behind climate change is well-understood: The mean temperature is increasing, with significant variation superposed from place to place and year to…