Quote of the day

Alun Uncategorized No Comments

For non-Welsh people, Mer­thyr Tyd­fil is town half an hour or so inland.

“We don’t get a lot of sharks around here, so he did very well.”

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Paul Mar­shall­sea drags Bronze whaler shark away from Noosa beach
A BRITISH hol­i­day­maker grabbed a six-foot shark by its tail and dragged it away from a group of tod­dlers as they played in shal­low water off the coast of Queensland.

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Hysteria as a response to snow

Alun Uncategorized 2 Comments ,

As with many things Charlie Brooker was there first. The video below was from three years ago. #Snow­maged­don has become a staple story in the UK with the first winter snow.

What might be inter­est­ing is what snow ter­ror tells us about cli­mate change.

There’s an inter­est­ing news story from 2000, with an awful head­line but a couple of inter­est­ing quotes.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

Accord­ing to Dr David Viner, a senior research sci­ent­ist at the cli­matic research unit (CRU) of the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia,within a few years winter snow­fall will become “a very rare and excit­ing event”.

Heavy snow will return occa­sion­ally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unpre­pared. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will prob­ably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said.

So apart from the quotes com­pletely dis­agree­ing with the head­line in the story, has Dr Viner’s pre­dic­tion come true? Does global warm­ing mean we’ll freak out when snow comes?

In the Tele­graph Boris John­son has just pos­ted: It’s snow­ing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/9814618/Its-snowing-and-it-really-feels-like-the-start-of-a-mini-ice-age.html

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Tentative Astronomical World Heritage Sites

Alun Uncategorized No Comments , ,

I’m mak­ing a note for myself here, but other might be inter­ested. It’s occurred to me there’s a very easy way to list sites on the tent­at­ive world her­it­age lists with an expli­cit astro­nom­ical con­nec­tion. Just search for the word astro­nomy on the list. It’s not rocket science.

It’s not per­fect either. The list­ing for Herat is tan­gen­tial to astro­nom­ical her­it­age, but other entries are obvi­ously rel­ev­ant, like Astro­nom­ical Obser­vat­or­ies of Ukraine and The Cape Arc of Meridian, South Africa.

One or two are new to me, so I have some read­ing to do.

#blog   #Astro­nom­ic­al­Her­it­age  

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UNESCO World Her­it­age Centre — Tent­at­ive Lists
UNESCO World Her­it­age Centre

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Some splendid lunar animations

Alun Uncategorized No Comments , , ,

I’m work­ing on a talk today. At one point it threatened to be inter­est­ing, but I think I’ve got that under con­trol. Some­thing that might spoil that plan though are some lunar anim­a­tions from NASA. You can Dial-A-Moon at their web­site and down­load anim­a­tions of lunar phases and libration.

Lib­ra­tion is inter­est­ing. It’s the wobble in the moon as it gets pulled around in orbit. The down­load­able anim­a­tions bring this out nicely and NASA has gone to some lengths to make them as usable as pos­sible for people. You can down­load the files in vari­ous formats from http://j.mp/dialamoon or watch them via YouTube.

#blog   #moon   #astro­nomy  

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CC licensing and open access

Alun Uncategorized 9 Comments , , ,

Here’s an example of how lim­it­a­tions through CC licences can change what you do with a paper.

I’m look­ing at an image. At first I thought to use it in a blog post about organic bat­ter­ies. I thought I could do that because the paper is open access, but the licence of the paper is BY-NC-ND. Tak­ing an image from the paper and blog­ging about it is pretty much mak­ing a D of it. The ND for­bids deriv­at­ives, even if the point of the deriv­at­ive is to say “Hey go look at this paper!” The page for the image itself has no CC licence inform­a­tion, so it looks like the copy­right in the footer applies.

I can see why there’s the NC clause. This has its own prob­lems, like mak­ing it unus­able for things like Wiki­pe­dia, but I can see sense in it. But ND seems an odd clause for sci­entific papers. Surely (properly-credited) deriv­at­ive works are a good thing for sci­ent­ists? I can see there’s a reason for ND in artistic pro­tec­tion, but sci­ence papers gen­er­ally aren’t works of art. Are there good reas­ons for Nature to have the ND clause?

I’ve trimmed the image thumb­nail and descrip­tion from the link because they would be deriv­at­ive from ori­ginal paper.

#blog   #pub­lish­ing   #aca­demia  

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Lith­ium stor­age mech­an­isms in pur­purin based organic lith­ium ion bat­tery elec­trodes : Sci­entific Reports : Nature Pub­lish­ing Group

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The opposite of Open Access

Alun Uncategorized 9 Comments , , ,

Here’s an inter­est­ing paper I found while look­ing for inform­a­tion on a topic: EVALUATING THE STATUS OF UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITES IN EGYPT. I’ve no idea if the con­tent is inter­est­ing. How­ever, the reason I don’t know that (and prob­ably never will) is what makes the paper so interesting.

It’s avail­able at -http://dx.doi.org/10.5848/APBJ.2012.00005– http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/apbj/ijmc/2012/00000014/00000001/art00005 . Actu­ally I prob­ably should have said it’s ‘avail­able’ with air quotes instead. The reason is obvi­ous when you try to down­load it. Like 90% of journ­als you can’t because you need a sub­scrip­tion, but usu­ally there’s an option to buy the paper at some high rate. Not here. You have to sub­scribe to the journal to get the paper.

To be clear to read this paper on UNESCO World Her­it­age Sites in Egypt, because I have an interest in archae­olo­gical her­it­age, I have to sub­scribe to a journal that pub­lishes in the same issue:
EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TAX SAVINGS AND REGULATORY SCRUTINY THE CASE OF SLOVENIAN PROPERTY INSURERS
-http://dx.doi.org/10.5848/APBJ.2012.00012–
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/apbj/ijmc/2012/00000014/00000001/art00012
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDUSTRY AND CAPITAL DETERMINANTS OF COMPULSIVE BUYERS’ BEHAVIOUR: THE CASE OF RETAIL CLOTHING MARKET IN LITHUANIA 
-http://dx.doi.org/10.5848/APBJ.2012.00034–
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/apbj/ijmc/2012/00000014/00000001/art00034
EXPERIENTIAL CONSUMPTION OF TIME: A CASE STUDY OF CONSUMING FREE TIME IN THE CONTEXT OF ENTHUSIASM FOR HORSES -http://dx.doi.org/10.5848/APBJ.2012.00037– 
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/apbj/ijmc/2012/00000014/00000001/art00037

I’m will­ing to believe these are all excel­lent papers in their field and well worth £150 as a bundle to the right per­son — but not to me. Pub­lish­ing this way really does lock away research to a nar­row audi­ence. The bar­ri­ers to get­ting the paper mean I won’t be includ­ing it in any research databases.

The punch­line? Check the name of the publisher.

#blog   #archae­ology   #her­it­age   

Edited due to a com­ment by +Rheza Rozendaal : I really should have checked the DOIs

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