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Among last week’s engagements was the excellent launch of our joint programme (with DfID and the Scottish Government) entitled Combating Infectious Diseases of Livestock in Developing Countries (more manageably: CIDLID). Livestock are often the chief assets of the rural poor, and their diseases can consequently be particularly devastating. CIDLID will provide ca £13M of research investment via 16 grant proposals, each involving researchers based in the UK and in appropriate developing countries. As with the eradication of Rinderpest (considered to be worth $1Bn per annum), to which we contributed significantly (PDF), the potential gains could be huge.
Continue reading: Combating infectious diseases, photographs and memristors
It is reasonable to argue, and I have done so, that Science proceeds via an iterative process involving both analysis and synthesis. One of my pleasurable events this week was an invitation to the Rank Prize Fund awards, where both were in evidence. Lord Rank’s interests had covered both Agri-Food (“Rank Hovis McDougall” in my childhood and beyond) and cinematography (“The Rank Organisation”, famous for the gong, whose true audio history I heard at a lecture at school ca 1969 from Jimmy Blades and is here), and the awards are targeted to these areas. The three sets of winners had (i) pioneered non-invasive methods for assessing lactation in vivo, (ii) worked out a significant part of the molecular basis of gluten intolerance, and (iii) were the originators of the excimer-laser-based corneal correction of vision. (I was especially interested in the latter, as during the 1970s my uncle had pioneered the development of ruby lasers in treating detached retinas.)
Continue reading: Biology as analysis and synthesis
TW3, for those old enough to remember, was a pioneering piece of TV satire that took a wry look at (mainly political) events of the previous week. While this blog has no such aspirations, it has often tended to follow a style that looks back at previous events. At this time of year, and given that this blog is a little over a year old, it is reasonable to reflect on some of the stories that we highlighted this year, whether in our news or via media releases. Some were about awards to our scientists, including the Jim Gray award to Carole Goble, Honours at the New Year and the Birthday Honours, The Times Higher Research Project of the Year to Bill Davies and his team, and 3 Queen’s Anniversary Prizes.
A number of other stories were about funding announcements, including the £100M for the Institute of Animal Health at Pirbright, the £10M towards ELIXIR, the £10M Bees and other pollinators initiative, and the funding pulse we announced for important short-term research into H1N1 swine flu. Happily, as I discussed in my blog in May, twice, and in June, swine flu thus far has proved not to be as virulent as was predicted by some. I note that we were already funding work that produced some significant advances this year, e.g. work for H1N1 vaccine discovery by expression in plants, and genomic studies of H1N1 evolution.
Continue reading: That was the week that was…and the year
One of the consequences of the flood of text and data increasingly available digitally is the need for effective means for summarising and visualising their content. One simple metric is based on the frequency of words (or indeed tags, such as those done collaboratively – a folksonomy), and a widely used visualisation device (a simple one based on tags is also used as a search device in these blog pages) is the word cloud or Wordle, in which frequency is encoded by the font size of a word. More sophisticated versions are based on text mining, and recognise phrases and terms rather than single words alone.
Continue reading: What’s in a name? A tag cloud of recent blogs
The introduction to most scientific papers will probably contain something along the lines of “It is widely accepted that….”, followed by the citation of a few more or less recent reviews of the topic. Last week’s blog noted the frequency of mis-citation, and this leads, surprisingly naturally, into asking the question ‘which reviews or papers might one then cite to bolster a view of present-day knowledge on a subject, and on what basis are these chosen?’ A partial linkage between these two issues (mis-citation and choice of material to cite) comes via what Merton (1968) (with a follow-up in 1988) called the Matthew Effect, on the basis of the lines in Matthew’s Gospel (25:29) that read “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”.
Continue reading: The Matthew effect in Science – citing the most cited
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