Stephen Curry

This is going to add minutes to my life – every time I take the bus.

Important Bus Business

Having devoted a fair number of the words on this blog to open access over the past year and a half, I have found myself invited to an increasing number of meetings on the topic. Whether run by RLUK, the Royal Society or the LSE, these meetings have invariably been interesting, but they often seem to bring together many of the same people, mostly from libraries, funders, publishers and learned societies.

Open access on the conference circuit

I spent all of today attending the “In metrics we trust?” workshop organised jointly by HEFCE and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. This was part of the information-gathering process of HEFCE’s independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment;

Debating the role of metrics in research assessment

I said the open access debate had been torrid. And it continues apace in the wake of last week’s announcements from the UK government and RCUK, the organisation that represents the common interests of Britain’s Research Councils.

Your Invitation to the Open Access Debate

Mark Henderson’s The Geek Manifesto is a remarkable book. Though many of its themes are not new, it is difficult to imagine such a book being published as recently as five years ago. The Geek Manifesto provides a timely analysis of the power that different groups of geeks have levered from the growing sophistication of the of the internet.

Manifest Sense

This is astonishing. Harvard is one of the best and one of the wealthiest universities in the world but last week its Faculty Advisory Council* announced that it can no longer afford to maintain its subscriptions to academic journals. The announcement was made online by the Council as a message to the academic staff at the university. I have taken the liberty of quoting it in full below.

Harvard: we have a problem

Well this is nice. The Celebrating Crystallography video made last year by the Royal Institution, which I narrated and helped to script-edit, has won the the EuroScience New Media award. Full details are available on the RI blog but it’s great to see a project come to such fruition.

Prize-winning video

What the hell is Stanley Kubrick’s

 2001: A Space Odyssey

about? I’m sure I don’t know. I’m really, really sure I don’t know.

Movement and Music

Roll up! Roll up! Lay-deeeez and Genne-men! Step right in! We have here today for your delectation and amazement a veritable cornucopia of comeliness, a festival of fecundity, a very large bucket of sciency bits, in all their wondrous and freakish varieties. We present Scientia Pro Publica Number Twenty-Two! Like a barnacle’s penis, this edition of Scientia Pro Publica is long and strange and packed with seeds–for thought.

Scientia Pro Publica 22

Ian Sample’s _Massive – The Hunt for the God Particle_ is a fast-paced account of the quest for the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that is purported to solve the mystery of mass. If you were unaware that the question of mass was the least bit mysterious, you are in good company–with about 99.99% of the population of the planet for whom the matter of matter has never arisen.

Light work of a heavy matter

At the risk of getting uber-meta, here is a blog post about writing my latest blog post at the Guardian. This was an account of a scientific discovery, albeit a minor one, that occurred during the process of shepherding the latest paper from my lab to publication. Why write about writing this post? Because maybe it will help others, and maybe it will help

 me

to think it through.

Anatomy of a blog post on the anatomy of a scientific discovery

I read an article by Matthew Reisz in

 Times Higher Education

last week about the strained writing style of academic publications and it really got my goat. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good piece and makes some valid points, several of which resonated strongly with me. Reisz wonders at the lack of pleasure in academic writing among writers and readers, which leads to the inanimate style of much academic prose.

Reach for the Styles

It is the weekend and I have been treating myself to some time with the paper. Usually, I buy the Saturday Guardian. On occasion I will also get The Observer on a Sunday but most weekends I don’t have the time to absorb both. Sometimes even one newspaper is too much. The book review section is a particular favourite and one of the reasons I have switched away from the digital version of the paper that is served on the web.

Ways of Seeing

It’s funny how one thing leads to another. The video of my Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution last year caught the attention of a former colleague and produced an invitation to contribute a lecture to her plans to celebrate the International Year of Crystallography at the University of Western Australia in Perth this summer.

Australia Tour 2014

One final look back before I turn to face 2022. Following a practice started last year, I have maintained a thread of tweet-sized reviews of the books that I read in 2021 – all of them. The Twitter thread of the books I read in 2021. Click on the image to see the high-res version. There are only eighteen in total, a singularly unimpressive tally – fewer even than I managed in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Books of the Year

At 6:18 on the afternoon of Tuesday 4

 th

August a huge store of ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut. The blast, one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history, killed nearly 200 people, injured thousands more, and left over a quarter of a million homeless. In the immediate vicinity, the blast wave overturned cars and tore the cladding from buildings;

Our Beirut Brexit

Following my post of last week asking RCUK to include in the guidelines on their new open access policy a statement disavowing the use of impact factors in assessing funding applications, I wanted to thank everyone who registered their support. I also wanted to provide the text of the letter that was sent yesterday to Alexandra Saxon, RCUK’s Head of Communications.  All the signatories are listed below.

Impact Factors — Letter to RCUK

Apologies, this will be obvious to some, but I have seen enough so-so images on social media to convince me there are others who could post much better pictures if they took just a little bit more care. Smartphone cameras are so good these days that everyone is a photographer. But clearly, everyone

 isn’t

a photographer.

Compose yourself

The Free Speech Union (FSU) has published an article about my open letter to the Royal Society regarding the evident contraventions of its code of conduct by one of their Fellows, Elon Musk FRS. Unfortunately, Frederick Attenborough’s piece contains errors, omissions and speculative rhetoric which together contrive to misconstrue the meaning and intent of my letter.

Response to the Free Speech Union’s article on my letter to the Royal Society

There is an air of defeatism in progressive circles today, the day Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term as President of the United States of America.

Trump, DEI and Culture – what&#8217;s the vibe shift?

Barcelona is color As is my habit my favourite photographs from the year just past can now be found on an

 album on Flickr

. There are sixty-three in all, selected from a total of about 1800 which is quite a drop from my usual tally of around 2500. The dip in activity reflects my changed circumstances.

Photos of 2024

On Tuesday evening I was asked by Research Professional News for my views on a new report from think tank UKDayOne, which is calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, unlovingly known as the REF. The report is provocative and interesting. It has won loud support from one Dominic Cummings.

Abandon the REF?

“The Ruffian” is great title for Ian Leslie’s Substack given his predilection for roughing up lazy thinking.

Misreading on the tube leads to WAR “The Ruffian” is great title for Ian Leslie’s Substack given his predilection for roughing up lazy thinking. I first came across him as the author of “Conflicted”, an excellent book about how to disagree constructively, a practice he frequently deploys in his

 Ruffian

pieces. I sometimes disagree with Leslie, but not often enough to stop me paying the £4 monthly subscription to his Substack.

On the Freedom of Misunderstanding of Speech

The letter below started out as a ‘closed’ communication sent to DSIT on 11th October but in the absence of any response, despite two reminders, and the revelation in the meantime that the Secretary of State herself sometimes has  occasion to write open letters, I have decided to publish it.  Although my letter precedes the furore ignited by Michelle Donelan’s missive to UKRI raising her concerns about tweets by members of Research

An open letter on EDI matters to the Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)

Everyone we knew who had been on safari told us they’d had such an amazing experience that I was worried our expectations for our trip to Kenya were being set too high. Elephants trekking across Amboseli National Park  I needn’t have been concerned. For six days we bounced and rattled in a Toyota Landcruiser driven by our knowledgeable and sharp-eyed guide, Senei, and each game drive seemed to be better than the last.

Kenya: Where the Wild Things Are

Who is that stranger in my father’s bed? Those sunken eyes The concave cheeks Salted with stubble The thinned grey hair Plastered to a narrow skull. I have lost the man I loved. In truth it had been a long journey To this resting place. A slow stepping backwards As memory stuttered and stalled And confusion dampened The flares of anger That made strangers of us both.

The separation of life and death

Entrance to Auschwitz I  Last week I visited Auschwitz. I find myself hesitating to write or say anything because I can’t find the words to convey the horror of the place and, in any case, so much has already been written and said far more powerfully by the Jewish survivors of the evil that was the Holocaust.

A day in Auschwitz

Another year, another two thousand or more photographs, some of which I thought were quite good. There’s a little taster below but if you want to see the full set of 55 pictures that were my favourites from this year, you need to click through to my album on Flickr. Silhouetted Robin. Louvre Reflections. Colourful Communication Barcelona Balcony The Circle of Light. No Cafe Society in Autumn.

Photos of 2022

Things have come to a pretty pass when the UK can turn out Prime Ministers more frequently that I post to my blog. It might be taken as a sign of the times if the times weren’t so damned confusing. Black and white shot of people reflecting off the gleaming surfaces inside Barcelona airport  Whatever. The itch to keep writing is still there, even if it remains distracted by the demands of work.

Part-time talking &#8211; open science, research assessment and gender equality

“The Queen is dead; long live the King!” is such a cliché of stories and films that it was surprising to hear it for real. Not that we did

 actually

hear it for real. The secrecy surrounding the Queen’s final hours means we cannot be sure what was said at the moment of her passing or even if the new King had arrived in time.

Passing the Baton

You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure. Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, this weekend I’m mainly preoccupied with rethinking my commuting options. When in 2004 we moved to our current house, a 25 min walk from the station, I used to cycle for that leg of my journey to and from work.

A Declaration on Bicycle Assessment

With emails running alongside, barking for attention, we beat a retreat from London. The clamour of work was soon swamped by the heat and light and sights and sounds and smells of Barcelona, and by the newness and oldness of it all. In the evening as we wandered the narrow streets in a desultory Google search for a restaurant, the continental warmth seeped into our bodies like a muscle relaxant.

To the sea

Just three weeks ago, on eve of the weekend, my wife and I met an old friend for dinner at a restaurant in Southwark. Even then, the most normal things in the world were beginning to feel risky. Our friend works for Public Health England, but even if he hadn’t, the conversation would still probably have locked onto the coronavirus pandemic.

Three weeks

The UK government’s new policy to reduce bureaucracy in research institutions aims at an easy target. But the bonfire of administration lit by the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, risks burning down the foundations of much-needed efforts to value the many different people on which the health of UK R&amp;D depends

Should an interest in bureaucracy be a protected characteristic? I think a case can be made.

In defence of the bureaucracy of equality, diversity and inclusion

I have been coming to the Lake District on and off for much of my life. It is my favourite corner of England. I first came in 1981 when I was seventeen, as one of half a dozen venture scouts from Ballymena on a summer youth hosteling trip. Then, in the early nineties, we would make annual trips to gather here with my wife’s siblings and their families, overseen with smiles and cooking by my tireless mother-in-law.

In our elements

My new best buds…  When I started out on this blog back in ’08 I made a passing observation about my age, having noticed I was increasingly lifting my glasses to read the date on my watch. Not long afterwards I upgraded to varifocals. Now I have another upgrade to report: I have acquired hearing aids. It was not an easy transition. On the face of it, why wouldn’t getting a pair of hearing aids be just like getting glasses?

Augmented reality: me and my hearing aids

The new and improved Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings 2020 were published this week with as much online fanfare as THE could muster. Unfortunately, they are not improved enough. Sydney University’s Duncan Ivison makes case for impact rankings. And then you notice the advert.

The still unsustainable goal of university ranking

It is 31

 st

January 2020 and as of 11 pm tonight the UK will no longer be a member of the European Union. We have arrived at Brexit day. But this is not my Brexit. I did not want it. I did not vote for it. I argued against it with as much reason and reasonableness as I could muster.

This is not my Brexit day

My feet have hardly touched the ground since I got back from the DORA-HHMI meeting on “Driving Institutional Change for Research Assessment Reform” in Washington DC last week, but I wanted to log a few first impressions. I can’t hope to do it justice but please be reassured that the videos of the plenary session will soon be available, and there will no doubt soon be wiser and more considered ruminations on the conference.

First impressions: the DORA-HHMI meeting on research assessment reform

New Year’s Eve is almost upon us, so here we are again at the close of one long year and the start of another. Personally, it has been a year of endings and beginnings. Readers of this blog would be forgiven for thinking that it is one of the things that I have wound down in 2018, but in fact I am hoping to stir it to new life.

 Sunrise or sunset?

Endings and Beginnings

I am on holiday – in Mauritius, a tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean. And when I go on holiday, I make ridiculous plans.  I told myself I’d start running again. I’d get up early every morning, slip out of bed without disturbing my wife and cross the road to the beach. It might be hard at first but I could jog along the compacted sand at the shoreline, the sun rising at my back. It would be good for me.

I told myself…

Along with many of my academic colleagues from across the nation, I was asked by the Times Higher Education to set down at least one new year’s resolution for 2017.  I drew inspiration from Richard Hamming (whom I wrote about way back in the glory days of 2009)…  By the way, now that I have reach number 10 in this “In case you missed it” series, I think I will dispense with the numbers.

ICYMI No.10 &#8211; New Year&#8217;s Resolution

The post below was written as a comment on

Lizzie Gadd’s recent post

 explaining in some detail Loughborough University decision to base their approach to research assessment more on the Leiden Manifesto than DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment. So you should read that first! (The comment is currently ‘in moderation’ because, like myself, Lizzie is on holiday.

DORA, the Leiden Manifesto &amp; a university’s right to choose: a comment

This post is based on a short presentation I gave as part of a panel at a meeting today on Understanding Global University Rankings: Their Data and Influence, organised by HESPA (Higher Education Strategic Planners Association).


 Yes, it’s a ‘manel’ (from the left: me, Johnny Rich, Rob Carthy). In our defence,  Sally Turnbull, who was chairing, sat off to one side and two participants (one male and one female) had to

University rankings are fake news. How do we fix them?

On Tuesday morning last week MPs, MEPs, and representatives of various organisations with a stake in post-Brexit UK science gathered in the Churchill Committee room at the House of Commons for the launch of  the “Scientific priorities for Brexit” report, published by Stephen Metcalfe MP, chair of the Commons select committee on science and technology.

Grim resolve at the House of Commons on the scientific priorities for Brexit

Those of you who have read all 346 posts on my Reciprocal Space blog will have no need to read this one. You probably already have a sense of what I do and what I’m like – my science, my hobbies, my hobby-horses, and my foibles.  But on the off chance that you’re new here, or are a faithful reader who just can’t get enough, here is an interview I did with The Free Think Tank. I say ‘interview’ though this was no Michael Parkinson affair.

Interview with the author

Today EMBO Reports has published my commentary on the implications for scientific research of Britain’s recent decision to leave the EU. It’s free to read. The piece is trying to be more analytical than the more personal response that I posted at the Guardian.

ICYMI No. 6: What is the meaning of Brexit?

I have just posted a preprint of a book chapter on the interactions of open access and public engagement with science. It’s called “Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control?” and is my contribution to an upcoming book – “‘Here be monsters’: Science, politics and the dilemmas of openness” which is being edited by Brigitte Nerlich, Alexander Smith, Sarah Hartley, and Sujatha Raman.

For your consideration: a preprint on open access and public engagement

Another year, another tweet thread of the books I read these past twelvemonth. Click on the images to access higher resolution versions which are just about legible, or better still, read the thread on Twitter. In 2022 I managed just 20 titles, five of them novels and seven by women.

Books of 2022

I was sneered at on Twitter yesterday for sneering at people taking pictures of the Impressionist paintings on display at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. Fair enough perhaps. I had adopted an exaggerated version of the pontifical tone that comes so readily when composing tweets and not everyone saw the funny side. But behind my mock outrage was a genuine note of annoyance. I don’t have a strong objection to people taking pictures.

How to look at Art?

On Wednesday of this past week I found myself in the presence of royalty and felt quite giddy. It happened at a Royal Institution shindig to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first televised broadcast of their world-famous Christmas lectures. As you can see in the photograph below the Duke of York was in the room but that’s not the type of royalty I get excited about.

Meeting David Attenborough at the Royal Institution

As part of its celebrations to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of

 Philosophical Transactions

, the world’s longest-running scientific journal, the Royal Society has organised a conference to examine ‘The Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication’. The first half of the meeting, held over two days last week, sought to identify the key issues in the current landscape of scholarly communication and then

Can we amend the laws of scholarly publication?

Full marks and a side order of brownie points for the Royal Society: they have started publishing the citation distributions for all their journals. This might seem like an unusual and rather technical move to celebrate but it matters. It will help to lift the heavy stone of the journal impact factor that has been squeezing the life out of the body scientific.

Jolly good fellows: Royal Society publishes journal citation distributions

It’s less than 24 hours, so this still counts as a timely post. I guess I had been primed because I had been thinking about it. But although I hadn’t set my alarm I found myself awake at 02:52 on Monday morning – I can still see the digital display – and so I got up, checked out the window that the moon was visible (it was – and already mostly eclipsed), dressed and hurried downstairs, grabbing my camera and binoculars on the way.

Lunacy and sanity

This past week I have been doing so much reading and writing for work that there has been no time to prepare anything substantial enough for a proper blog post, even if I have been stirred by the excessive protests of Mark Walport or the over-selling of what is actually a nice piece of virology. But I have squeezed in a little additional reading on the side and thought I would take a couple of minutes to pull the links together.

This week – reading, thinking and linking

Dear Publishers Association  I ask that you amend the open access decision tree you created for incorporation into the guidance notes accompanying the Open Access (OA) policy announced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) in 2013. It may seem odd to ask for a correction so late in the day but my reasons for doing so are two-fold.

Open letter to the Publishers Association: please amend your open access decision tree

I have been struggling to write something about my trip to Australia in August, my first visit to that great continent and undoubtedly a highlight of 2014. In my determination to get away from the rather banal what-I-did-on-my-lecture-tour-and-family-holiday trope, I ended up loading the first draft with too much historical and philosophical baggage.

Impressions of Australia

I haven’t written a book. And this is it. Well, I did write it of course. The words are mine. But there is nothing new here. I’ve just pulled together a selection of my blog posts from the last six years and self-published it as a hard-back book titled

 A Thousand Nothings

using the services of lulu.com. It wasn’t that hard. Still. It is a bit… awkward.

Vanity project

My week, my cultural week, started last Sunday when I found time to catch up with Radio 4’s five-part series on Dorothy Hodgkin, an extraordinary scientist who was brought vividly to life through readings of her letters. Hearing the words created an immediacy that I am not sure I would have grasped from the printed page. If you have not yet heard it, the series is also available as a podcast.

Digital culture: my so-called week

A year ago today Occam’s Typewriter made its debut on the blogosphere and I published my first post at the new home of

 Reciprocal Space

. It’s been a good twelve months. OT has established itself as a home thoughtful and lively writing with a great range of different voices.

First Anniversary

Ben Goldacre wrote a short blogpost today to bemoan the habit of many media outlets of

 not

linking to the primary sources for their reports and headlines. He was referring to stories that have appeared today about Asian gangs abusing white girls (e.g. this form the BBC). In typically trenchant terms he dismisses such shoddy reporting, “If you don’t link to primary sources, you are dead to me.” I sympathise.

Burying Pigs and Information

I spent the last two days in Leicester at Translation UK, a two-day conference that is an annual gathering for scientists working on all aspects of translation — the protein synthesis kind. The conference is friendly and informal. It is kept short so that it is cheap enough for labs to send postdocs and PhD students who dominate the roster of speakers.

Advice on presentations: I&#8217;m not as clever as you think

This is the original version
 
 (with the original title)
 
 of an article that has been published at The Conversation.

Having climbed all the way to the Nobel prize on a ladder made of Nature, Science and Cell papers, biologist Randy Schekman has turned around and declared that he is going to boycott these ‘luxury’ journals in future because of the way that they damage science.

The Schekman Manoeuvre

In

 Reinventing Discovery

Michael Nielsen says that one of the great things about the Internet is the way it can connect problems with problem-solvers. Well, let’s see if that’s true. I have a problem with Excel, or rather, with a particular spreadsheet that I would like someone to solve elegantly. You can download a version of my spreadsheet here. The image below shows the contents.

Reinventing Excel

I may not know much about art but I know what I like and I like the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner — all the more so now that I have seen the Turner and the Sea exhibition at the National Maritime Museum.

Impressions of Turner

The internet was all aflutter last week because Elsevier has sent thousands of take-down notices to Academia.edu, a social networking site where many researchers post and share their published papers. This marks a significant change of tack for Elsevier.

Why Elsevier is completely in the right… and totally wrong

The Royal Institution has made a rather lovely film about William and Lawrence Bragg, the father and son Nobel laureates who came up the method of structural analysis by X-ray crystallography around 100 years ago. The film is constructed around an interview with Lawrence Bragg’s daughter Patience, a delightful lady who has very fond memories of her father and some wonderful stories about him.

The very interesting web of connections

This post has nothing to do with science. Seamus Heany is dead. I am only begining to process what that means to me. I claim no deep knowledge of his poetry but it has been with me for a long time. I studied his work at school in the late 1970s; I have a few of his books of poems and prose on my shelves; I saw

 The Cure at Troy

at the Tricycle theatre in 1991; I heard him speak once — when I was a postdoc in Boston in 1994.

Follower

This week it is the turn of the House of Commons to investigate the UK policy on open access. No-one seems to be quite sure if they are co-ordinating things with the House of Lords, which was looking into this issue only last week, but on the plus side at least all these inquiries mean that OA remains a live topic.  I made a submission to the House of Lords committee — outlining what I thought were several key points. Many others did the same.

Response to House of Commons Committee Call for Evidence on Open Access

As a little experiment I sat down and recorded an audio version of my Occam’s Corner post on the historical account of the difficulties that scientists had in accepting the reality of atoms.  You can listen here:     And here is the video of Brownian motion that is mentioned:          Enjoy!

What does the Higgs boson look like? (Audio Version)

Everyone’s talking about open access (OA). It has been a year of dramatic developments in the drive to liberate access to the research literature and the blogosphere is buzzing with excited chatter. Well, perhaps not everyone and not even the whole of the blogosphere. It’s important not to get too carried away. I wonder how much in the online discussion has spilled over into common rooms and group meetings around the world?

Open Access Juggernaut Hits London

Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic Games spread a warm glow through liberal hearts. His imaginative sweep over British history and culture, which managed to be both reverent and irreverent, was filled with a human chaos that constituted a nicely judged response to the shock and awe of the massed ranks who launched the Beijing games.

&#8220;You can&#8217;t read this book&#8221; but you should

For me, one of the more appealing aspects of open access publishing is that by making costs transparent it could stimulate competition between publishers and generate innovative solutions to drive down prices. Today sees the launch of one such innovation: a new open access platform for life and medical sciences called PeerJ. It is a fascinating gamble that may well pay off.

PeerJ &#8211; a brave new world?

I had an argument with my colleague in the tea-room the other day. Gratifyingly, I learned he had been reading my blogposts on the subject of open access, but it soon became clear he did not entirely share my enthusiasm for the topic. Specifically, he criticised open access journals such as PLoS ONE both for their lack of sub-editorial services and for creating a home for poor quality science.

PLoS ONE: from the Public Library of Sloppiness?

Scientists should do this. Journalists should do that. And eventually we will live in a world where the media reporting of science achieves perfection. At least that is the hypothesis. The hypothesis was put to the test at the Royal Institution last night in a discussion organised by Alok Jha and chaired by Alice Bell.

The road well trodden

It has been a quiet week in lab woebegone*. Though we have been working to pack up everything for a move across campus in mid-January, Christmas has intervened to scatter us to our homes, where traditionally we have the time to reflect on the year just past and galvanise ourselves for the one to come. Except that this year I haven’t had the time.

Work and Energy

Today sees the publication of a very important report on libel reform. The report is from the Parliamentary Joint Scrutiny Committee, which has been considering the government’s draft defamation bill in the light of oral and written evidence from interested parties. It outlines proposals for refinement of the draft legislation before it passes through Parliament and, hopefully, into law.

Libel Reform: steps forward

Since the beginning of the argument with Elsevier over their support of the Research Works Act (RWA) in the US and the announcement of the boycott of the publisher, I have been keen to stimulate dialogue.

An Open Letter to Elsevier

I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at a Biochemical Society meeting on the subject of the Research Excellence Framework, the process that will assess UK academic research quality for the purpose of determining how a large tranche of public funding will be distributed between universities. I dealt in particular with the impact component, which will count for 20% of the assessment and has caused a degree of consternation.

Incoming

Plagiarism is pernicious and pervasive. You can’t seem to get away from it because so many people are getting away with it. As a university teacher I have long been aware of so-called essay-writing services that tout their wares to students who think that by purchasing essays written by someone else and passing them off as their own they can buy their way to learning. Fools. That’s what universities are for.

Plague-arism

Regular readers of this blog will be probably be aware of the ongoing campaign to reform the libel laws of England and Wales. These laws have pernicious effects in many aspects of public life — including science and medicine. They place a dangerous constriction on the freedom of scientists and medics to engage in robust debate on matters of  public interest.

Libel Reform &#8211; where are we?

I was back at the Diamond Light Source today — the synchrotron that we use to blast protein crystals with X-rays to figure out the structures of protein molecules. The beamlines at the synchrotron where we do our experiments have some very fancy kit and, in explaining the apparatus to one of my students, I was reminded of how much things have changed in the past twenty years.

The Speed of X-rays

“There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer… I don’t put that forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has … Continue reading →

With these words at the opening of the second episode of his masterly television series,

 Civilisation

, Kenneth Clark introduces an engrossing account of the unexpected flowering of creativity in 12th Century Europe.

Artful History

It has been a beautifully clear and sunny day – perfect weather for a barbecue. We dined and chatted with our guests as the afternoon turned to dusk and then the stars began to wink in the night sky. After everyone had gone and the clearing up was mostly complete, Saturn had ascended above the houses across the street.

Rings of Saturn

I was banging on last week about how scientists should use words rather than guns during public engagement. Words are safer — and often more effective. But they are not

 completely

safe. In fact, they can sometimes be rather dangerous, especially when used without due care and attention in England and Wales, where the libel laws take a keen interest in the words of any unsuspecting author.

You may not be interested in this but this is interested in you

On Wednesday last I was fortunate to find myself an outlier among the great and the good at the Wellcome Trust Image Awards for 2011, where hefty glass slabs were being handed out by Adam Rutherford as prizes to imaginative individuals who had conjured a captivating image from their scientific work.

Prize Your Imagination

I wasn’t going to do a review of the year’s blogposts but, on the off-chance that the recent move to the shiny new site at Occam’s Typewriter has attracted some new readers, I thought I would provide a brief guide to my personal favorites of 2010.

Snapshots of 2010

Hi All – this is just a short placeholder post for anyone who

 may

have wanted to leave a comment about my farewell post at Nature Network, which is now up. I’m afraid I am unable to respond to comments there, so thought I’d make a space here.

Moving On

I’m not proud of myself but I have to confess to a lascivious addiction. I know. It’s disgusting. But I can’t help it.  The problem started in 1999. I remember all too clearly my first glimpse of the well-proportioned curves and smooth, smooth skin. After that I was hooked. Oh. God. I couldn’t resist. The Apple G3 PowerBook, my first ever laptop, was gorgeous.

Touch, Feel

Having delighted in Jacob Bronowski’s

 The Ascent of Man

earlier this year, I sat down to watch Carl Sagan’s

 Cosmos

, which several commenters had recommended to me. You can read what I thought of it in my guest post at Grrlscientist’s Punctuated Equilibrium blog over at

 The Guardian

. As you will see, it is wrapped up with the recent apparition of shiny sculptures by Anish Kapoor in Kensington Gardens.

Cosmos and Kapoor

The British cardiologist

 Dr Peter Wilmshurst

was reported in 2007 to have made remarks critical of a clinical trial involving a medical device made by NMT Medical. He is now being sued for libel. The case is complex and I have not mastered the detail.

Libel Reform: Not There Yet

A quick note here for those interested in the details of the case for support behind the Science is Vital Campaign that is fighting against cuts in the UK’s public spending on R&amp;D. The campaign has posted key points and I have written my own digest of the case on the

 Naturally Selected

blog over at

 The Scientist

.

Science is Vital &#8211; The Case for Support

She’s here. She’s in the room. I’ve not noticed her before — not in previous years — but every now and then her presence is unmistakable. I am sitting in a lecture theatre in St Andrews University in Scotland, attending the 16th Meeting of the European Study Group on the Molecular Biology of Picornaviruses, or Europic, as it is more conveniently known.

The Lady in the Room

I promise I

 won’t

make a habit of just posting links to stuff on other sites but I am childishly proud of having a piece about macromolecular crystallography in the Guardian Science Blog.

Monsters in the details

Three

 unrelated

things. The first is to alert you to a little update of my last post on the Sense about Science demonstration outside the Department of Health to raise awareness about their lax proposals for the regulation of traditional medicine. The protest passed off successfully on Wednesday and there are now photos of the event available on flickr.

Three Things

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the dying replicant Roy says of his off-world experiences in one of the final scenes of BladeRunner.

The Crowded Cell

When Simon Jenkins wrote in

 The Guardian

a couple of months back about science being a new religion we all scoffed. Oh, how we scoffed. Scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff. Scoff. But having been at the Edinburgh Fringe for a few days now, I’m wondering if he

 might

have had a point.

The Seriously Funny Fringe

It is the day after the day after the fortnight before. I had hoped to write sooner about the relentless work and tremendous fun I had participating in I’m a Scientist, Get me Out of Here over the past two weeks. But such was the nervous energy expended in the last week that it has taken me till now to recover my bearings.

I&#8217;m a scientist, and there are fantastic kids out there

Wunderkind of audiovisual media that I am, I confess to being rather late in getting around to this one. Even I hesitated at the narcissistic self-absorption of it. But as a blogger, I must learn to overcome such hesitations. Here, to demonstrate my proper credentials and my total commitment to the vocation, is a photograph–taken just now–of the computer on which I have begun to compose this post.