Condensed concepts

I continue to enjoy reading my hard copy of The Economist every week. Occasionally, I post examples of insightful graphics presented in arti...

The mission of universities is thinking : teaching students to think and enabling scholars to think about the world we live in. Yet, it is d...

Every scientist is a person. They have a unique personality and a unique life story. Their family, friends, education, hopes, romances, cult...

 If organisations are emergent can they be managed?  This is the question I discussed in a previous post, stimulated by an article,  The Dia...

“Fortunately, the majority of gentlemen who are persuaded to steal things don’t really know a huge amount about science” This is a choice qu...

The road from materials research to commercial technology is a complex and tortuous one. It is not just a matter of what is physically possi...

 My economist son often listens to the podcast, Conversations with Tyler Cohen. We recently listened to a conversation with Esther Duflo , w...

I was asked for an update on this. The challenges are formidable, but not insurmountable. Here are slides from a talk on the subject. As ...

A recent issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the massive expansion in higher education, both private and public, in Afri...

Today there are many threats to science playing an appropriate role in education, public policy, and general public discourse. Some include ...

I am a vocal critic of the use of metrics to evaluate individuals, single scientific papers, journals, sub-fields, institutions, .... Howev...

Tomorrow I am giving a talk about academic publishing for a group of faculty and Ph.D students from African universities. The challenges the...

About five years ago Massive On-Line Courses (MOOCs) were all the rage among politicians and university managers. Like most hyped up fashion...

Different qualities are used to describe and characterise societies: civil, fair, intolerant, racist, corrupt, free,  …. Two big questions...

Think! Research is all about thinking about the world we live in; whether it is genetics, cosmology, literature, engineering, or economics...

I learned a lot from reading In the Eye of the Storm : The Autobiography of Sir John Houghton (with Gill Tavner). He is arguably best known...

Dimitri Mendeleev , who proposed the periodic table of the elements, purely from phenomenology and without quantum mechanics! He even succe...

On the one hand to make progress in science you need to focus, work hard, and build your expertise. This leads some to think that it best th...

Four important goals to me are to teach students: 1. To think. 2. To think like a physicist. 3. To think like a condensed matter physicis...

For me, global economic inequality is a huge issue. A  helpful short video describes the problem. Recently, there has been a surge of inter...