This may or may not seem a silly question to you. The reason I ask is that there is a mechanism in place to determine bang for the taxpayer pound in research. In its current incarnation it is called REF (Research Excellence Framework). It’s purpose is to “provide accountability for public investment in research.” As […]
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With the cold weather today, my teaching in the Malaysian workshop seems a lot longer ago than two weeks. But only two weeks ago I was teaching the statistics of crystallisation in sunny Malaysia. I enjoyed it. One of the fun things about teaching at this sort of workshop is listening to the other speakers. […]
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Reading an interesting, well written, scientific paper can be a genuine pleasure. But, possibly because I am a bad person, I enjoy even more seeing a scientific paper taken down. If you do too then Aaron Clauset’s (quite old, 2008) post is for you. The post reanalyses some data from a paper by Yu et […]
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I am in Malaysia for a school for Malaysian PhD students and postdocs. I have given four hours of lectures on modelling how crystals form. That is a lot – about 200 slides to prepare. That was hard work, but teaching really helps your understanding. Generally if you understand something you can, hopefully, explain it […]
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The musical the King and I is based on a real, 19th century, king and a real country. The country is Siam, which is an old name for Thailand. The king is the king of Thailand in the mid 19th-century: King Mongkut. I am currently visiting the Bangkok university named after him: King Mongkut’s University of […]
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George Pólya, the Hungarian mathematician, told a story about taking a walk and meeting the same couple over and over again. He became embarrassed about appearing to spy on them, but it got him thinking about the likelihood of repeated meetings between objects moving at random. In 1921 he published his famous recurrence theorem*, which […]
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