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Blog: Reciprocal Space Topics:science, arts, life
Category Archives: Science
Can scientific productivity be optimized?
This is a repost of an article that was originally published on the Research on Research Institute website. Comments welcome! It is a truth universally acknowledged that scientists who take greater risks are more likely to make important discoveries. … Continue reading
Books of 2022
Another year, another tweet thread of the books I read these past twelvemonth. Click on the images to access higher resolution versions which are just about legible, or better still, read the thread on Twitter. In 2022 I managed just … Continue reading
Posted in Book Review, Science
2 Comments
Intelligent life: Isaiah Berlin
Thanks to the paucity of my education and cultural life I have come late to Isaiah Berlin, the noted philosopher and historian of ideas whose thinking provided such a guiding light to the 20th Century. But I’m definitely a fan … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Science, Science culture
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Part-time talking – open science, research assessment and gender equality
Things have come to a pretty pass when the UK can turn out Prime Ministers more frequently that I post to my blog. It might be taken as a sign of the times if the times weren’t so damned confusing. … Continue reading
Posted in Science
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A Declaration on Bicycle Assessment
You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure. Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, … Continue reading
Posted in Science
4 Comments
In the garden
What is it about living through a pandemic that has quelled the motivation to write? I suspect it may have something to do with the unstructuring of time, or rather its reduction through confinement to rhythms dulled by repetition. Whatever … Continue reading
Posted in Science
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A Reckoning with Huxley’s Legacy
Recognition and Redistribution for Imperial College’s Community This is a guest post by my former colleague, Dr Rahma (Red) Elmahdi, in which she lays our her reaction to the Imperial College History Report, and in particular the recommendation to rename the Huxley … Continue reading
Posted in Science
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No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding
(Please note that this post was updated on 12th Dec 2020 – see below) This week DeepMind has announced that, using artificial intelligence (AI), it has solved the 50-year old problem of ‘protein folding’. The announcement was made as the … Continue reading
Posted in Protein Crystallography, Science
23 Comments
Nature’s new open access option – a few first thoughts
A news article published online in Nature this morning discusses the announcement of new open access options in the Nature family of journals. The details are in the article, but the basic story (written by Holly Else) is that authors … Continue reading
Posted in Science
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Teaching online: how to use an iPad as a whiteboard
Last week I gave my first online tutorials in which I needed to scribble on a whiteboard and show the students their exam scripts from last term, which had been posted to my home. To solve both of these problems, … Continue reading
Posted in Science
5 Comments
The Flattened Curve
The lockdown might have flattened the curve of infection and death, but it has also flattened the curve and swell of life. Existence has shrunk to fit within four walls; life ‘outside’ has largely been compressed within the flat rectangles of … Continue reading
Posted in Science
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Three weeks
Just three weeks ago, on eve of the weekend, my wife and I met an old friend for dinner at a restaurant in Southwark. Even then, the most normal things in the world were beginning to feel risky. Our friend … Continue reading
Posted in Science
2 Comments




