Blogs

Frank Norman considers his position as a hybrid librarian/information scientist and the frequency of situations where he is considered neither one nor the other:

I am always a bit of a fish out of water, with an unerring knack for finding myself to be an oxymoron. Working in a Research Council institute is one example. Research Councils (RCs) have “.ac.uk” internet addresses, so we appear to be part of the UK academic community, but we are not part of the Higher Education (HE) community. We do research not teaching.

The question of whether Research Councils are part of Government has all sorts of implications, from journal pricing to data security measures to rules in place during the run up to the recent General Election.

the rules of pre-election purdah were extended to all RC establishments. This meant that no public announcements about new research findings could be made by RCs or RC institutes until the election was over and a new government formed. Once again RCs seemed to be “the wrong kind of academic”

Elsewhere, Kausik Datta and Viktor Poor take on homeopathy in their own inimitable styles: Viktor presents a cure for the common cold while Kausik conducts a detailed analysis of a paper investigating homeopathy as an alternative to antibiotics in treating E. coli diarrhoea.

Tom Webb takes a break from fatherhood to summarise some of the best bits of Nature in the last few weeks, David De Roure tackles the common misconception that arts and humanities are lagging behind science when it comes to technology and Richard Grant comes camera-to-camera with the Google Street Car:

Photo by Richard Grant. See his blog to see what’s on the other side

Meanwhile, Richard Williams reports on his PhD at the 7 week mark, concluding that it is still too soon to have a detailed project plan; Mark Schrope details a report giving the scientific background to the US oil budget; Barbara Ferreira tells the story of 16th century Danish Astronomer Tycho Brahe and Nicolau Werneck teaches those of us familiar with digital signal processing how to design a digital filter before moving onto how electric guitar strings relate to pulsed neural networks.

And finally…

Stephen Curry shares a decade long love affair: