STFC
-
Hanging together? — The future of the CMB in the UK
·
[Warning: this post will be fairly technical and political and may only be of interest to those in the field.] I spent the first couple of days this week stuck in a room in Cambridge with about 40 of my colleagues pondering a very important question: what is the future of the study of the…
-
Cutting Advanced Fellowships in the UK
·
Right now, the UK’s astronomy and nuclear/particle physics research council, STFC, is supposedly undergoing a series of “consultations” with the community to try to figure out exactly which of the many possible big-ticket items (telescopes, satellites, particle detectors, etc.) the community wants to pursue. In the meantime, however, things are proceeding in their usual autocratic…
-
Playing catch-up
·
So, apologies for taking so long between posts. For now, I’ll blame twitter and its ADD version of blogging, because that at least lets me point to an interesting meeting that went on last week: the .Astronomy Conference on Networked Astronomy and the New Media. the conference brought together several related strands of astronomical computing,…
-
STFC Endgame
Thanks to Dave for pointing out that the final results of the STFC programmatic review sweepstakes popularity contest consultation exercise have been released. Following on from the recommendations, which grouped all projects into five projects, the STFC Council has decided where and how the money will flow. The best news overall is that only the…
-
STFC Consultation results
No time for a full blog post, but I wanted to point out the results of the STFC Consultation, now available. Some of my favorite projects like AstroGrid seem to have not fared too well (the consultation panel rated it highly, but PPAN, responsible for the final ranks, disagreed). Nonetheless, Imperial Astrophysics projects like Planck,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
AstroGrid at NAM
·
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…
-
Tales of the unexpected
·
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…
-
Gemini telescope: back for the UK
·
In an unexpectedly rational decision, STFC (UK astronomy’s funding council, if you haven’t been paying attention) and the board of the Gemini telescope, have come to some sort of agreement to reinstate UK observing time for the time being, with the further statement from Gemini that “The Board asks that the Chair and Designated Members,…
Search
Recent Posts
Categories
- Academia (64)
- Art (57)
- Blog (1)
- Miscellanea (101)
- Music (71)
- Net (63)
- News (28)
- Politics (110)
- Science (332)
- Uncategorized (4)