All posts by John de Bruyn

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog, Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

A week in Lisbon

I spent last week attending the International Conference on Rheology in Lisbon, Portugal. This is the biggest conference in the field, and is held every four years. It alternates continents: in 2004 it was in Korea, and in 2008 in California. The next one, in 2016, will be in Kyoto, Japan. There were about 1000 people there, and 11 parallel sessions of contributed talks. It was a very intense conference, with talks starting at 8:30 AM and running until 6:30 PM. They even had poster sessions during the coffee breaks, so there was very little time to sit and catch your breath! However they had a good social program, including a port-tasting evening, a half-day bus tour on Wednesday afternoon, a beach party, and a banquet, so there was a bit of time to see some of the sights, to talk shop and get to know some people.

I enjoyed most of the talks I attended and got several good ideas, which for me is the mark of a good conference. Now all I need is time, and money, and students to turn the ideas into reality …. One thing that impressed me was the breadth of subjects that were covered, and how the flow of complex fluids impacts many diverse areas of research and application. There were lots of talks about blood flow, for example, and blood clotting. Also lots of talks about nanocomposite materials made of polymers mixed with carbon nanotubes or graphene. There were very applied talks about polymer processing and highly theoretical talks on trying to predict bulk properties based on molecular structure, which is one of the holy grails of the field. Most talks were well presented and interesting.

My own talk was scheduled for late Friday morning, the last talk in the last contributed session on the last day of the conference. To make matters worse, one of the talks in my session was cancelled, so everyone drifted off to other rooms for a while. Most of them came back, however, and I had enough of an audience – about 20 people – for my talk to make it worthwhile. Since it was the last talk, there was time for quite a good discussion and question period after.

I enjoyed Lisbon and would go back to see more of the city if I had the opportunity. It reminded me of Rio, perhaps not surprisingly, but was better looked after and not as crowded. Restaurants were relatively inexpensive and the 20 words of Portuguese I picked up in Brazil served me well! The weather was great – low 30s and sunny all the time.

Now it is back to reality, with two courses starting in a couple of weeks and a to-do list a mile long.

Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

imaging the propagation of light

Here’s an interesting “Ted Talk” by Ramesh Raskar from MIT’s Media Lab, in which he describes a technique for taking REALLY high-speed videos – a trillion frames per second. He shows a video in which he images a light pulse propagating through a bottle of water. My immediate reaction was that this had to be a fake, and it sort of is – he does what he calls “computational photography.” He sends out many short pulses of light and takes many images at a given delay time using a boxcar- type system, then averages them. The results are spectacular, however, and he describes some particularly cool applications of this technique.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second.html

There is a bit more information on his MIT web page:

http://www.media.mit.edu/people/raskar

 

 

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog, Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

impact factors

We’ve had some discussion recently about the use of bibliometrics and impact factors as a way of evaluating research quality. Very recently, my collaborators chose to submit our joint paper to one journal rather than another because the chosen journal had a higher impact factor.

Today I found this interesting page, which gives the impact factors of physics journals:

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~tmf20/physics_journals_impact_factor.shtml

You can see some interesting disciplinary differences even from this list: particle physics journals tend to have higher impact factors than condensed matter journals, for example. It is also interesting that overall there are very few physics journals with what one might call high impact factors: Phys. Rev. Lett., Nature Physics, and some review journals. Most of the rest (except for the particle physics journals) tend to have impact factors below 3. In contrast, many of the “normal” biochemistry journals have impact factors around 5.

This list doesn’t include a lot of the fluid mechanics journals I tend to publish in these days but they all have impact factors around 2 to 2.6.

What does this all mean? Your guess is as good as mine. But here is one interpretation (not mine!): Physics doesn’t have much impact.

Of course it is easy to raise the impact factor of the disicpline as a whole. All physicists simply have to cite twice as many papers as we normally would when we write our own papers. Of course it would also help if we all wrote twice as many papers as well, all of which cited lots of other papers. The result would be a huge number of useless papers with meaningless references, but Physics’s impact factor would go up. This should give you some idea of my view of the value of this statistic as a measure of the quality of research.

 

 

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog, Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

academic repression

I’ve just read the article that Pauline pointed us to in her comment on my earlier post. Here’s the link again:

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5388

Read this article. It is really shocking. Faculty at Queen Mary University London (the other London) are being fired if they don’t publish enough papers, including a prescribed number in “high profile” journals. This is absurd. Faculty who complained about this evaluation policy are being investigated for misconduct. I was so angry after reading the article that I fired off an email to the president of QMUL. I urge you to do the same. Details in the above article.

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog

CCA report on science funding released

In 2010, NSERC asked the Council of Canadian Academies to look into ways to assess research performance in the various NSERC disciplines. The resulting CCA report has now been released.

Here is a link:

http://www.scienceadvice.ca/en/assessments/completed/science-performance.aspx

This web page gives a brief summary of what’s in the report. You can also download the full report there if you want to. The full report is 162 pages long, and no, I haven’t read it yet.

At first glance, thoiugh, it appears to me that the conclusions of the report are reasonable. Here is a summary, taken from the above web page:

“After examining the available evidence, the Council’s Expert Panel came to a small number of key findings, listed below, and concluded overall that quantitative indicators should inform, rather than replace, expert judgment in science assessment for research funding allocation. The Expert Panel also developed four guiding principles to support research funding agencies undertaking science assessments in support of budget allocation, they are: context matters; do no harm; transparency is critical; and expert judgment remains invaluable. The principles are expanded upon with the Panel’s report.”

The “quantitative indicators” they are referring to are things like bibliometric measures, as discussed in one of my earlier posts.

Here are their “key findings:”

  • Many science indicators and assessment approaches are sufficiently robust to be used to assess science performance at the field level in natural sciences and engineering (NSE).
  • Quantitative indicators should inform, rather than replace, expert judgment in science assessment for research funding allocation.
  • International “best practices” offer limited insight into science indicator use and assessment strategies.
  • Mapping research funding allocation directly to quantitative indicators is far too simplistic, and is not a realistic strategy.
  • There is no compelling reason for certainty that past successes will lead to future successes or past failures to future failures. As a result, science indicators may not always provide a reliable guide to future prospects.

My understanding is that NSERC will give the research community an opportunity to respond to this report, although as yet we don’t know any details. As a member of CAP’s NSERC Liaison Committee, I will be involved in the physics part of this response, so feel free to pass your comments on to me. I also understand that NSERC will then take this report into consideration in deciding on a new Discovery Grant “reallocation process” to move money around among the disciplines. This means that it’s potentially quite important.

 

 

 

Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

fold proteins on your computer; make someone else famous

You have probably heard about “citizen science” distributed computing projects, in which you can run a program on your computer that produces data that is used for real scientific investigations. Folding@home is another such project. You can download a program that computes configurations of protein molecules. The information your computer generates will help the investigators (who are from Stanford Unibersity) understand the process of protein folding. Here’s their web site: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/HomePage