A quick search of the on-line British Newspapers has found a headline writers dream but a rather lack of originality, possibly indicating convergent evolution.

Unfortunately the fossil find is in Denmark but I guess it was pining for the fjords.

The student report I am reading is clearly not the work of a single author, style wanders from paragraph to paragraph. i have detected 2 pages lifted from science and another journal, this report is already doomed but I will read to the end.

It used to be easier, students just lifted complete reports from open web pages. they are getting better at hiding things. A give away in engineering is over precision in SI units that convert to round numbers of traditional/imperial units. this is a sure sign of something ripped off from a US industrial source.

It is very depressing that students resort to such desperate measures when so much is riding on their report. A poor report gets some marks and normally a pass if you have turned up in the lab and done some work. if you are detected plagiarising you get zero.

Why is it that in the UK only sport between Oxford and Cambridge Universities (note the between, it is important) raises any interest and not just among the alumni? Nobody cares about the boat race between Salford and Manchester Universities, nobody cares about cricket at Loughborough University or football at any UK University. However, THE boat race is watched by millions worldwide. Indeed, sport is so non-U at Manchester U that even though we have a number of olympic hopefull students swimmers, they train with the Stockport Swimming Club because the university does not have a coaching staff. Universities elsewhere in Europe also seem equally unfazed by sport.

Cross the Atlantic, however, and sport at university is king. The football (strange american variation on the game) coach can be the highest paid employee, stadia regularly fill with 60,000 or more for College games. Scholarships are widespread for almost every sport (I bet there is even a Scrabble one for Henry Gee). Prowess in Uni sport is important to the alumni and appears to affect fund raising.

So we now know who cares about sport at University, but can anyone explain why?

Is the Haldane Principle a good thing? The essence of the principle is that governments just give a dollop of money to “the scientists”, who then agree how to distribute it. In practice this was to be achieved by independent research councils, who were to be immune from commercial and political pressure. A great idea in theory. Did it ever work? In fact did the model ever operate in the UK or have the politicians always been directing from above.

If it is a good thing, then how do we try and get this form of funding model going again?

A colleague once set a question (in Oxford of course) where he described an alloy oxbridgium with light blue and dark blue phases. This did not go down well and the students complained that the examiners were not taking their task seriously.

However, when I did my undergraduate course there was a three hour essay question that often set questions such as. “I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten em”, discuss – well I did do metallurgy.

Now my memory (selective of course) is that we found these questions humorous rather than offending our sensibilities. So can we use humour in exams? Is it ethical and are these questions really funny when you read the question in an examination?

I think I read a few posts in this sort of area a week or so ago. Please don’t add the same comments on the failure of teachers in the 60s, 70s, 80s or even 90s.

These days, with spell and grammar checkers, you would imagine that students would produce more readable prose but no, the same errors and spelling howlers appear as they have done for the last 10 years I have run this class.

Rant over, normal service will be resumed.

So where do I tend to publish? A lot will depend on the content. If the work is in structural materials science, the market leader is Acta Materialia (even if it has the ugliest Cod Latin title I know) but its impact factor, at 3.5, would be regarded as derisory by many in othet fields. If you look at the highest impact Journals in Materials Science they are either review journals or ultra-short letter Journals (Nature Materials, Advanced Materials). It can be difficult showing logical analysis, especially when figures are required and a sequence of equations useful, in a 4 page format. I also feel that “supplementary data available online” is a cop out. If its needed for the argument it should be in the main body and not used as an excuse to fit within the required page limit.

So, to the current dilemma. At the moment we are looking to publish results on the mechanical properties of biological tissue, with co-autors from the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences. If you suggest a journal that takes a lot of Nanpindentation papers and thus if you publish there it will be noticed by the testing community but it has an impact factor of 2.4 (J. Mater. Res.) the Lifers consider the suggestion at best a waste of time and at worst an insult. But if we only publish in Circulation, non-biologists will not be exposed to it.

Well it looks as though we should publish everything twice, once in a format for each community with suitable maximisation of cross-referencing to boost citations!

I have studied people in my own field (Materials science) as I have my own opinions (prejudices) of good-guys and bad guys. If we use the Web of Science as a suitable data base we can use the Citation Report tool to eliminate self-citations from the body. I have found that the good guys have self-citations as < 50% of total cites (I am at 25%). Bad guys have > 50% self-citations. The best I have found so far is h-factor of 12 based on > 80% self-citation. I need to do more research on this so watch this space.

Discussions with eminent academicians in the field of materials science reveal that there is a critical shortage in China of people trained in such boring yet necessary crafts as metallurgy. Its just the same in the UK but we have been convincing ourselves that we can just import those who are necessary from India and China. However, China will soon not have enough trained students for their home market.

So what is to happen? Materials science Departments are closing down worldwide or having difficulty in recruiting undergraduates. Even those that are large enough to survive are finding it hard to keep themselves viable. And what they teach may have drifted considerably from the traditional physical metallurgy core to replace it with “trendier” subjects in the nano- and bio- areas. This has apparently (I have heard) led to MIT students on exchange visits to the Universities in the UK not being able to easily do many of the undergraduate courses on offer because they lack essential prior knowledge and terminology.

So here is the problem. we need traditional materials engineers (there is an acute shortage). But those we are currently training may not have the required skills. So how do we convince people to do these subjects and get a job?

I tried to run a test on whether the rumour that elgoog (google mirror) evades the firewall but unfortunately it appears to be down for repair. Try http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg18424782.700 for information on elgoog and the firewall.

A colleague has just returned from the TMS meeting also in the USA. he tells me that the session on Magnesium Alloys might as well have been cancelled as all the Chinese presenters could not attend because they could not get visas. China is the major producer in the world of Mg alloys and the current centre of research into the metal.

Does this mean the end of international meetings in the USA? Two years ago the American Ceramic Society organised the International Conference on Ceramics in Toronto to ease visa difficulties. Rui presented his work in Germany last year and we will send him to the European MRS in Warsaw this autumn. However, he will not get the opportunity to present his exciting results on nanomechanics to the US community.

So there we have it – the War on Terror has strangely mutated into a War on International Science

Assessing small country science is an interesting exercise. Ireland likes to state how it is currently the richest country in the European Union (possibly second to Luxemburg) but its population size is about that of a larger European City (Greater Manchester is about 3 million, Hamburg Metropolis about 4.5 million). So how does the science of Ireland compare to that of a European city? From the evidence of my panel, not badly. Like many other Western economies, the Science base has been expanded by immigration. There is a large emphasis on simulation/modelling and, as is common in most other communities, poor rapport between modellers and experimentalists.

It is clear that scientists in Ireland believe that their research should be supporting local industry as there were many references to biotechnology and microelectronic clusters. However, Irish high tech. industry is mostly imported multinationals and the question is whether they are there for the long term.

Collaborations across disciplines are always difficult and examplar talks (one by a biologist and one by a physicist) were interesting in that the collaborations seemd one way in each case. The biologist was doing interesting work but the “physics” was the use of a rather simple tool to blast temporary holes in cell membranes. This was an exciting development for the biologist but the physics development (as part of the project) seemed minimal. The other talk – from the physicist – appeared to be trying out a range of diagnostic tools where the development was in the physics/engineering to supply a tool that did not improve the understanding of biology bu possibly speeded up diagnosis. Here it seemed a little like classic technology push. Now both projects are worthy and very good examples of working across a boundary but neither seemd a true collaboration with equal work done by the physical and life sciences.

Are there opportunities or true interdisciplinary work or is it always one way with one side providing a target or a developed technique for the other to work with?

Use as many co-authors as possible. Everyone self-cites so make sure you get a slice of their action.

Choose your discipline – Life Science publications normally have a longer bibliography than those in the physical sciences. Work in a physical science faculty but try and get your papers part of the Life Science corpus.

Publish early, publish often, constantly up-date your work.

Salami slice your work. Why publish an article when 3 letters will do.

Know your referees and make sure you reference their work copiously. It is always good when the editor asks for referee suggestions and you have ex-students on faculty elsewhere.

Duplicate with a difference. Someone has synthesised a gold nanoparticle? Do it in silver then copper etc.

Write reviews, Or better still get your students to write the review, edit it and publish.

And with all these hints, who needs to do anything as obvious as plagiarise.

So how do we work together? It is clearly possible once the field has been defined e.g. X-Ray and NMR techniques in structural biology. However, in the field of biomechanics and tissue engineering there are still many misunderstandings and areas of mutual incomprehension. Life Scientists are difficult to understand as theirs (like ours) is a world of jargon. Surgeons and Physicians, who seem to think a bit like Engineers, are easier to work with in that they can define problems very clearly.

There is clearly hope. When I discuus our techniques with potential users they are always interested. My latest project is to use acoustic techniques to probe the mechanical properties of tissue at a micron resolution. I have an enthusiastif life scientist colleague who acts as a marketing agent and their appear to be countless opportunities. However, I feel like a snake oil salesman as I am sure my claims are sometimes accepted without question.

Watch this space for progress reports in science at the interface and potential mutual incomprehension.