Movember is now in its tenth year but like many men, I’ve resisted the urge to grow a Mo because of an inability to grow a decent moustache a reluctance to look like a p0rn star / seventies pervert / gay cowboy [delete as appropriate] a fear of scaring off potential collaborators, customers, undergraduates, postgraduates, friends […]
The wiki-wiki (quick) shuttle bus in Hawaii by xordroyd. Creative Commons licensed picture from Flickr. Regular readers of this blog might remember that back in June of this year, I suggested that the Royal Society should employ a wikipedian in residence. After emailing, blogging and other ranting, Paul Nurse got in touch with me to say that the Society was sympathetic to the idea and would investigate.
The Radcliffe Camera, Oxford by chensiyuan via wikipedia The UK’s premier Digital Research community event is being held in Oxford 10-12 September 2012.
According to Arthur Lander, “hairball” networks like the one of human proteins above, are the new icon of biology, taking over from the famous double-helix. Image originally published in BMC Biology [1].What happened was, I was looking for a creatively commons licensed picture of Pedro Mendes to upload to commons.wikimedia.org.
Airplane by By Kuster & Wildhaber Photography The Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk has launched a Fellowship programme that recognises outstanding UK-based researchers who use software. The Fellowships come with £3000 funding which can be used for travel, collaboration and running events.
bbc.co.uk/programmes as a QR Code by /Sizemore/ Mike Atherton on Flickr available under a creative commons licence Over at @BBCSport and @BBC2012 there are some Olympian feats of big data wrestling going on behind the scenes for London 2012 [1]. While we all enjoy the Olympics on a range of platforms and devices, a team of twenty engineers is busy making it all happen.
Long jumper for Snohomish. Creative Commons licensed picture by by Philo Nordlund on Flickr If Science were an Olympic sport, which events would scientists excel at? During the Beijing Olympics in 2008, I wondered what Olympic activities scientists would be good at, with a list of events.
The Raspberry Pi (not pictured above) is currently blowing raspberries at its competitors at an impressive rate of four thousand per day. Creative Commons licensed picture of Rasberries by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos on wikipedia. The key to successful technology is not just the tricky combination of innovation, determination and investment but also word play friendly branding.
Computer Science as a subject in mainstream UK secondary education is in a pretty sorry state [1,2,3] but it’s not all doom and gloom. While many long suffering school children are being force-fed a nauseating diet of Excel, PowerPoint and Access others are enjoying a nutritious platter of Raspberry Pi, Hack to the Future and Animated fun.
The Parthenon at night by Konstantinos Dafalias, creative commons licensed picture available on Flickr. If you look carefully, you can see the inscription “Elgin woz ‘ere, 1801” where the Marbles were stolen from. Here is a recipe and serving suggestion for delicious Parthenon Marbles cake, originally developed by Thomas Bruce, better known as Lord Elgin.
Rocky Balboa, Philadelphia, PA. Creative Commons licensed picture by seng1011 (steve eng) on Flickr. [This post is part of an ongoing series about impact factors] In the world of abused performance metrics, the impact factor is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the (publishing) world. It has been an eventful year in the boxing ring of scientific publishing since the last set of figures were published by Thomson-Reuters.