Surprising news reported in todays British papers concerning the identification of a fossil bird found in Scandinavia as the Norwegian Blue

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 time has come to mark final year student projects. I am sitting in front of the comoputer at home ready to manually google the reports I am reading. As we demand hard copy submissions (why, I am not sure, it must be lost in the mists of time) we cannot easily use Turnitin or other software tools.

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.

Comments about fractions of a blue on Education to the Nation have prompted me to write a blog entry rather than continue on that thread.

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?

Being an academic scientist is a great profession. Once you have a permanent position (tenure) your chief role (apart from teaching) is to “do” research. In the good old days, when the Haldane Principle applied, government agencies applied a light touch and scientists got the funding to do pretty much what they wanted to do. This was because it was believed that scientists knew best what to spend their effort on. That has now sadly changed and research in the UK (and elsewhere) is being increasingle driven by politicians, because they now believe that they know what is the best for the country in terms of scientific research.

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?

It is the time of year when we hard working professors and lecturers set examination questions for our undergraduates. Well actually they were set some weeks ago to allow for time consuming administrative procedures to kick into action. I would like to ask whether it is possible to set a humorous exam question?

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 have just read and assessed (we don’t use such 20th Century termas as marking any more) a number of 1st year student projects. I am sick to the core of seeing an axel of a car. I did not believe 19 year olds were still into Guns ‘n’ Roses or maybe they genuinely cannot spell. I will not go into the grammar or lack of it that is present in these works.

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.

How do people choose the journal to submit their research output? This is a question I have had to ask myself recently because I have been considering where to submit new results. As I have said elsewhere, a large number of people go for the highest impact factor journal. However, there must be some self-regulatory impulse, otherwise everyone will submit to Science or Nature in the first instance. I would like to explore this further if anyone wants to pick it up. Do people have a pecking order and do they judge perceived quality/impact of their work befor matching with the journal in the list?

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!

The H-factor or H-index is beloved by many as an incorruptible measure of research productivity. I have begun an informal investigation of abuse of citation to see what is really going on in the dark world of academic self-promotion. Self-citation was of course recognised as an issue by Hirsch when he proposed his index but generally people have though it would require intense effort by scientists to build up an impressive track record by self-citation alone. However this may not be the case…

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.

I have just returned from a trip to China. 18 months since my last visit and the changes keep on coming. Chongqing is like a scene straight from Bladerunner complete with 200m high neon festooned buildings.

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 am in China and have probed the Great Firewall. As news reports state, I have been able to access the BBC website in English. However, a Wikipedia inquiry to Tibet results in the denial of the page. If I run VPN to the University of Manchester, then I can access all the denied websites.

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.