I may not know much about Chemistry but I know what I like. And I like carbon. In fact, I’ve decided that it’s my favourite element. I’ll tell you why in the short video below, which is part of the Royal Institution’s 2012 Advent Calendar. Please take a little time to explore the rest of the calendar.
Last week I spoke on open access at the annual conference of Research Libraries UK (RLUK). I did so at the end of a session that also featured Dame Janet Finch, who had chaired the working group set up by the government to make recommendations on expanding access to the scholarly literature in the UK, and Mark Thorley, the public face of the new policy on open access developed in the light of the Finch report by Research Councils UK (RCUK), the
A round-up of some of the issues that got an airing during Open Access (OA) Week and in the days that followed, including more rumination on the implementation and implications of the RCUK OA policy, more bad (and some good) publisher behaviour, ideas for new directions in OA publishing and, finally, an important African perspective on the rumbling debate. The start of open access week From 22-28 October
CP Snow must be doing cartwheels in his grave. The BBC has made a beautiful, intelligent film about the second law of thermodynamics. You only have until Tuesday 30th Oct* to catch it on iPlayer and you should. Presented by Prof. Jim Al Khalili, the first episode of Order and Disorder is devoted to the slippery concept of Energy.
It is two weeks since the meeting organised by the Imperial College Science Communication Forum to discuss the new open access policy announced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) in the light of the Finch Report. Richard Van Norden of Nature chaired an initial discussion between RCUK’s Mark Thorley and myself that kicked off a wide-ranging question and answer session.
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.
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?
It is a year to the day since the release of my film, “I’m a Scientist“, in which six different scientists talk openly about their lives in the laboratory and what makes them tick. The aim of the film is very much to cut through the myth that all scientists are heroes and geniuses. To mark this first anniversary and to make the film more useful in the classroom, I have split it into ten bite-sized chunks.
Everyone of a certain pretension likes to think they have a book inside them. I know I do. But I’ve looked and I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in there somewhere but at too early a stage of germination to be visible. All I know is that I have searched and come up wanting. The situation is made all the more galling by the fact that everyone I meet these days seems either to have written a book or to be in the midst of producing one.
A resonant blogpost is the gift that keeps on giving. One of the latest comments in my Sick of Impact Factors polemic bemoaning the corrosive effects of journal impact factors on scientific lives provided a link to a quite wonderful paper. I missed Alexis Verger’s comment when it dropped into my blog on August 31st.