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;

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.

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.

Last night on Twitter someone posted a ‘selfie’ taken by the Mars Curiosity rover. It’s quite a photograph, particularly since it captures a fantastic piece of human technology amidst the landscape of another planet. The detail is what makes the picture. If you click to get a larger view you can see the nuts and bolts holding the rover together and the waves of sand on the Martian surface. My reaction was immediate.

Last night I lost my virginity. To be precise, I lost my Café Scientifique virginity because I gave a talk about science in a café in Portsmouth at the kind invitation of local organiser Maricar Jagger. It was a really good evening. I gave a short talk about my research and how I see my role as a scientist in modern Britain to a varied and interested audience who proceeded to ask lots of questions.

I observed recently how the rise of the internet has eliminated letter writing and so caused some of the wells of correspondence that historians and biographers have relied on down through the ages to fall into disuse. But the internet is not all bad as far as reaching into the past is concerned. In fact, it can preserve and propagate memories in ways that are a huge improvement on what went before. We forget every day how lucky we are.

Regulars at this blog will be familiar with the dim view that I have of impact factors, in particular their mis-appropriation for the evaluation of individual researchers and their work. I have argued for their elimination, in part because they act as a brake on the roll-out of open access publishing but mostly because of the corrosive effect they have on science and scientists.

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!

Around Downe, Sept 2012, a set on Flickr. I visited Downe yesterday. Darwin’s home village is quite close to where I live and we like to avail ourselves from time to time of the local environs and the local (which is called the George and Dragon). I had my camera with me. If you will indulge me, I am experimenting here with the link between my flickr account and my blog.

I am sick of impact factors and so is science. The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.