Why the Nobel prizes need a shakeup

Posted on by

Jim Al-Khalili has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian arguing that the Nobel prizes need a shakeup.

Of course one can argue that scientific progress has been taking place for hundreds of years and it is just that we are so much better now at reporting it. This is true. But one thing has changed: research disciplines previously unconnected are now starting to overlap and merge, with physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, medics, computer scientists and mathematicians pooling their expertise to attack common problems. One such exciting field that is coming of age is quantum biology – where quantum physicists like me work alongside molecular biologists to attempt to explain a number of baffling phenomena in living cells.

He’s right. The rise of data-intensive science means that the original idea behind the Nobel prizes is beginning to look inadequate.

School report gets it wrong!

Posted on by

From John Gurdon’s school report when he was 15 years old:

“I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to teach him.”

Today, it was announced that Gurdon is to share this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine with a Japanese researcher, Shinya Yamanaka, for their work on stem cells.

Hugh @90

Posted on by


Professor Hugh Bevan, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I’ve only been to two 90th birthday parties in my life. The first one was EM Forster’s in 1969, in King’s. The second was for my friend and Wolfson colleague, Professor Hugh Bevan, who is 90 today. He’s a distinguished legal scholar who has made great contributions in the field of family law. As his daughter said at the event: “We’re here to celebrate Dad’s first 90 years”. Long may he continue.

Biofuel: feeds cars, starves people

Posted on by

Interesting paper by a trio of complexity theorists about the near-term implications of the US drought. Abstract reads:

Recent droughts in the midwestern United States threaten to cause global catastrophe driven by a speculator amplified food price bubble. Here we show the effect of speculators on food prices using a validated quantitative model that accurately describes historical food prices. During the last six years, high and fluctuating food prices have lead to widespread hunger and social unrest. While a relative dip in food prices occurred during the spring of 2012, a massive drought in the American Midwest in June and July threatens to trigger another crisis. In a previous paper, we constructed a model that quantitatively agreed with food prices and demonstrated that, while the behavior could not be explained by supply and demand economics, it could be parsimoniously and accurately described by a model which included both the conversion of corn into ethanol and speculator trend following. An update to the original paper in February 2012 demonstrated that the model previously published was predictive of the ongoing price dynamics, and anticipated a new food crisis by the end of 2012 if adequate policy actions were not implemented. Here we provide a second update, evaluating the effects of the current drought on global food prices. We find that the drought may trigger the expected third food price bubble to occur sooner, before new limits to speculation are scheduled to take effect. Reducing the amount of corn that is being converted to ethanol may address the immediate crisis. Over the longer term, market stabilization requires limiting financial speculation.

The uses and abuses of Skeuomorphism

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

Or consider this, from Wired magazine, claiming that Apple’s iPhone app, Find My Friends, “includes astonishingly ugly, faux stitched leather that wastes screen space. On the new iCal for the Macintosh, things are odder yet: When you page forward, the sheet for the previous month rips off and floats away, an animation so artless you’d swear it was designed personally by Bill Gates.”

Ouch! What Apple’s designers are being accused of, it turns out, is the grave sin of skeuomorphism. Now there’s a conversation-stopper if ever I saw one. A skeuomorph is, according to the OED, a ‚”derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original”.