Parley with a parochial perpetual perceptive popular poster!

Get that?

I have been answering some questions about why I write this thing.

You can look in wonderment at Sylwia Presley's blog to find out more. It's often an interesting site, this week covering the ethics around the US election as well as some great photos and blogging tips.

It's been great to take part through her series of blogger interviews. Other subjects have included Karl, Lolly, Colin, Rich, and the prodigies that are Kid tech Guru and Monik.

JET set for an open evening

The UKAEA team, who were at the science event in Didcot emailed me with some dates for public open evenings at my local fusion experiment.

Sounds interesting! Looking back over the power plants I've visited since I was a kid, my CV reads like this:

• Nuclear
• Coal
• Hydro-Electric
• Tidal Barrage
• Wind
• Pumped Storage

I've also been to the centre for alternative energy in Wales and seen solar water heating and geothermal energy in use in France.

Fusion can be my next, hopefully ITER, the next big experiment will viably produce power!

"The monkeys' performance improved markedly with practice"

Hope of a cure for motor neurone problems today. You can read about the story on the Nature News site where I got the title from (with it's nice technorati backlinks widget) and also the BBC.

Moritz, C. T. , Perlmutter, S. I. & Fetz, E. E. have proved the concept of using signals from a monkey's brain to make it's own paralysed limb move.

I think that the discussion so far has managed expectations really well. Even Luboš Motl's cheeky mock-up of Stephen Hawking as Superman has provoked nothing but measured commentary.

Now let me see, how do I bet on future Nobel Prize winners...

What a great name!

...nice headline too!


You can check out the press release here and get the latest news from Henri Boffin's peers here at the Eurekalert service.

Wherever there is fun there's always... SCIENCE!

Scientists say Coke kills sperm and was one of those furphy spermacides during the second world war it's the Coke Side of Pro Life.

Thanks to TheImaginator: Digg.com, Asianplumb: blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au, candafilm: Digg.com.

As I predicted, the the IG Nobel prizes have provided a veritable minefield of fodder for a Hodgeblodge entry or two, you can read the real story here: The prize was awarded to two teams of doctors—one team discovered that Coke is an effective spermacide; the other team discovered that it is not.
(improbable.com)

Schrödinger's LOL cat and my WOMbat in a box

"Schrödinger's cat" was a legendary thought experiment to explain an abstract situation which occurs when you apply the rules for very small particles to life-sized objects..

You are not sure whether the cat is in the box because, even though you put him there, there is a small probability that he is at any point in the universe.

When you look inside the box you will know if he is there or not. But the process of looking inside the box makes the cat "decide" whether it is there or not...

As this was such a legendary thought experiment, Schrödinger's LOL cat just had to already exist, and here it is...

more animals
...but surely I'm the first to think up this tenuous link...

From Schrödinger's LOL cat in a box to my WOMbat in a box

The concept of WOM, (people talking about something and/or recommending it) has some similarities with the concept described by Schrödinger's cat. You stimulate some WOM, so now the WOMbat is growing, consuming the audience in his box. The WOM affects the system within the box, you have some evidence he is doing that, but then as Lolly asks...

moar funny pictures

...what is the end result? How do you know when the WOMbat is successful? You can do a general survey outside the box but you won't be able to ask the people inside the WOMbat's box at the time without affecting the WOMbat. Anyway, doing general surveys is old style market research. I find it somewhat ironic that the proponents of the brave new world of social media marketing resort to this to sell themselves.

Perhaps social media marketers have to be clever and measure not just the number of times a post is read, but also the number of diggs, stumbles, forum thanks and review site reccomends. Rationalising all that could be tough though...

It Rocks

Geology

• Upper - Sarson tertiary sandstone at Avebury stone circle, Wilts.
• Lower - Devonian old red sandstone on the Brecon Beacons, Powys.

As Wacko Jacko (my Geology teacher) used to say wryly: "Perhaps the more sentimental of you may have stopped to admire the view."

ROWE ROWE ROWE the pun(t)

Reading Sylwia's interesting post on the results only work ethics model (ROWE for short) has inspired me to reveal something of my past experiences as a grad student. As Sylwia says, you can learn more about what ROWE involves on Lyndsay Blakely's post. In basic terms it is a work model where employees chose how much they work and are judged purely on results.

I would say that ROWE comes as standard for scientists in universities, here's why

• The work a group does and the money coming in is judged on perceived merit
• Must compete with Japanese and Americans who take goal orientation to the n'th degree
  
• The passion required and low salary mean that it is a vocation more often than not
  
• Supervisors would be hypocritical if they denied access to the social opportunities they themselves enjoyed as grad students, they may chose instead to dangle carrots like conference tickets for achieving milestones.

According to the post meantioned before "Perhaps the most significant one is the fact that for a ROWE to be effective, it requires a mature, goal-oriented manager." The crushing irony of the subtext of this sentence is, that the manager in question probably can't learn this maturity in a ROWE workplace. My conclusion is therefore:

Academics need to have done other jobs to to get good at their job!

They could also do with setting their job as supervisors in the context of corporations trying out ROWE. As a grad student, I was always told things like "it's different in academia" maybe it's not so different after all.

Guess I've learnt some things about management from my academic roller-coaster ride anyway. I will have to upload the journal article I contributed to one of these days, see how good my science communication and marketing is as I keep on banging on about it.

The World Wide Web Foundation (can anyone get excited about web standards?)

Tim Bernhards-Lee, inventor of the internet at CERN in 1989 has been sharing his vision of how it could help the world in the future. He hopes to do this through the launch of http://www.webfoundation.org/. Reading the website, I am a bit bemused as to what the aim of the organisation is, as are a number of commenters on Molly E. Holzschlag's blog.

The hot air about the LHC at CERN gave Tim the perfect example to tell us that "The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science" as described in a BBC article by Pallab Gosh. From Steven Clark's post I think I'm right in saying that Bernhards-Lee proposes making the web searchable by correctness rather than relevance. The plan might work, unfortunately the Web Foundation site doesn't get the message across effectively.

I think that Bernhard Lee's mistake is to think of those talking about science as being different to those talking about any other product or event. Bit of a mouthful I know, but I would prefer if he said:

"Science is fun, and it's great when people talk about it. It is the responsibility of the scientist to make their work so easy to understand and remarkable that the space of malicious rumours is reduced. When rumours do occur the scientist can reach out and educate the community, speaking a language they understand"

Would it not be great if the creators of this viral video got a guided tour of the CERN facility for their troubles?

No doubt there is some room for an internet policeman, but if NASA can win the marketing war, there is no reason why MMR vaccines, particle accelerators or NGOs can't. Some of the large funds for this project could be diverted into philanthropic marketing projects perhaps.

You can follow the Web Foundation on twitter @webfoundation

Hot air about the LHC at CERN - the hot circular lack of air

As the dust (that would be there if the CERN place wasn't really clean) settles on the bing bang story I would like to ask: Will they be able to generate this level of conversation when the high energy experiments kick off next year?

In the case of space missions, launches have become commonplace and no longer remarkable. From that moment on though, we have a definite time of arrival to look forward to. NASA also uses analogy well and underplays expectations. For example: even though previous missions had "found good evidence" of water on Mars, the lastest probe "touched" it. Most of the probes "last longer than expected"as well. I particularly enjoyed a workshop I went to at last year Piers Sellers (Britain's current Astronaut). Those guys are certainly half decent science communicators.

In the case of the LHC at CERN, the beauty of the engineering is now old news. Next spring there will probably be some new strangeness numbers for bosons. It will be interesting to see how the CERN marketing guys spread the word. As we tire of being told that the world might end, maybe they'll have to resort to calling particles mythical.