Archive for December, 2013

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MPS Beard of the Year: The Contenders!

Posted in Beards with tags , , on December 2, 2013 by telescoper

Nominations for the Inaugural Beard of the Year Poll at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex closed on Friday 29th November. We now move to the final phase of the competition, with a public vote. I’m afraid I had to rule out some of the nominees because no photographic evidence was supplied. I also have a sneaking suspicion that some of those who made the short list may not be entirely authentic. Please make your own mind up when casting your vote.

Before introducing the contestants, I’d like to say a big public thank you to our caterers, Chartwells, for producing this lovely cake for a  little “Movember” event we had in the School on Friday afternoon:

IMG-20131129-00226

The purpose of “Movember” is to raise awareness about testicular and prostate cancer, and mental health issues. We’ve gone a bit further and gone for a fully bearded version of the event, but in any case I hope that this bit of fun will at least remind blokes (who are notoriously bad at looking after themselves) to check our their bits every now and again. In any case always remember that facial hair is not just for Movember, but for life…

Anyway, to the contenders (in no particular order)

William Watson

Beard A: William Watson

Tomas Navickas

Beard B: Tomas Navickas

Beard C: Thomas Northam

Beard C: Thomas Northam

Beard D: Miss Lemonbeard

Beard D: Miss Lemonbeard

Beard E: Robert C Smith

Beard E: Robert C Smith

Beard F: Peter Beard(sle)y

Beard F: Peter Beard(sle)y

Beard G: Nathan Udy

Beard G: Nathan Udy

Beard H: Leonidas Christodoulou

Beard H: Leonidas Christodoulou

Beard I: Mateja Gosenca

Beard I: Mateja Gosenca

Beard J: Konstantin Blyuss

Beard J: Konstantin Blyuss

Beard L: Aurel Schneider

Beard L: Aurel Schneider

Beard M: Team Beard!

Beard M: Team Beard!

Beard N: Istvan Kiss

Beard N: Istvan Kiss

Beard O: Fabrizio Salvatore

Beard O: Fabrizio Salvatore

Beard P: Jan Schroder

Beard P: Jan Schroder

Beard Q: Leon Baruah

Beard Q: Leon Baruah

Now you have seen all the choices, please vote here:

The winner will be announced on Wednesday 11th December.

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Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 2, 2013 by telescoper

I received the following email about a forthcoming conference which is probably of interest to a (statistically) significant number of readers of this blog so I thought I’d share it here with an encouragement to attend:

–o–

IAUS306 – Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology

We are pleased to announce the IAU Symposium 306 on Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal from 26-29 May 2014, with a tutorial day on 25 May.  Apologies if you receive this more than once.

Full exploitation of the very large surveys of the Cosmic Microwave Background, Large-Scale Structure, weak gravitational lensing and future 21cm surveys will require use of the best statistical techniques to answer the major cosmological questions of the 21st century, such as the nature of Dark Energy and gravity.

Thus it is timely to emphasise the importance of inference in cosmology, and to promote dialogue between astronomers and statisticians. This has been recognized by the creation of the IAU Working Group in Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics in 2012.

IAU Symposium 306 will be devoted to problems of inference in cosmology, from data processing to methods and model selection, and will have an important element of cross-disciplinary involvement from the statistics communities.

Keynote speakers

• Cosmic Microwave Background :: Graca Rocha (USA / Portugal)

• Weak Gravitational Lensing :: Masahiro Takada (Japan)

• Combining probes :: Anais Rassat (Switzerland)

• Statistics of Fields :: Sabino Matarrese (Italy)

• Large-scale structure :: Licia Verde (Spain)

• Bayesian methods :: David van Dyk (UK)

• 21cm cosmology :: Mario Santos (South Africa / Portugal)

• Massive parameter estimation :: Ben Wandelt (France)

• Overwhelmingly large datasets :: Alex Szalay (USA)

• Errors and nonparametric estimation :: Aurore Delaigle (Australia)

You are invited to submit an abstract for a contributed talk or poster for the meeting, via the meeting website. The deadline for abstract submission is 21st March 2014. Full information on the scientific rationale, programme, proceedings, critical dates, and local arrangements will be on the symposium web site here.

Deadlines

13 January 2014 – Grant requests

21 March 2014 – Abstract submission

4 April 2014 – Notification of abstract acceptance

11 April 2014 – Close of registration

30 June 2014 – Manuscript submission

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The World’s Oldest Professor?

Posted in Education with tags , , , on December 1, 2013 by telescoper

Yesterday I was sitting at home listening to the radio when someone used the phrase “The World’s Oldest Profession”. Naturally, that made me think of those such as myself who Profess for a living (although that’s apparently not what the original expression applies to). Anyway, that idle thought made me wonder whether there is, in the Guinness Book of Records or elsewhere, a recognized holder of the title World’s Oldest Professor?

A short tweet about this elicited one suggestion: Professor Ephraim Engleman of the University of California at San Francisco who is an extremely distinguished Professor of Rheumatology and is still active at the age of 102. Blimey. That’s going to be a pretty though record to beat, but I thought I’d post about it to see there are any other contenders for (a) the world’s oldest professor in any discipline and (b) the world’s oldest professor in physics and astronomy?

Suggestions through the comments box please.

P.S. Apart from anything else, Prof. Engleman’s inspirational example has made me feel guilty for moaning about the advancing years at the tender age of 50; he’d reached my current age before I was even born!

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Farewell to Araucaria

Posted in Crosswords with tags , on December 1, 2013 by telescoper

I was just thinking this morning that it’s been a while since I posted about crosswords, and then an email arrived from Prof. Monica Grady pointing out the sad news of the passing (on Tuesday, 26th November, at the age of 92) of Johh Galbraith Graham, better known to crossword fans as Araucaria of the Guardian. I had missed the announcement of his death because I’ve just been too busy recently to look at the papers except at weekends.

For those of you not aware, the pseudonym Araucaria is the “Monkey Puzzle ” tree. Those of you who were aware already of that, I’ll add that another name for this tree is “Chile Pine” whence John Graham formed the anagram CINEPHILE, under which pseudonym he also set puzzles in the Financial Times for many years. Not a lot of people know that.

John Graham was an undoubted genius as a crossword setter, one of the few whose clues have made me laugh out loud when working out the solution not only because of their cleverness but also because of the wonderful sense of humour with which they were composed. His clues didn’t always abide by the strict conventions laid down by the father of the crossword puzzle, Derrick Somerset MacNutt (aka Ximenes) but he was a compiler whose transgressions in this regard were easy to forgive when so many of his clues were so brilliant.

Here’s a nice video made about a year ago featuring the man himself talking about the art of crossword setting:

I switched from the Guardian to the Independent some time ago so haven’t done any of Araucaria‘s recent puzzles – my only regret for having switched allegiances, as it happens. I’ve actually won prizes from the weekend Independent competition over twenty times subsequently, which has given me a steady supply of dictionaries. More importantly I do find their crosswords generally more challenging and more entertaining than the Guardian‘s. But the irreplaceable Araucaria was in a class on his own. Having given so much pleasure to so many people for such a long time, he has certainly earned his status as national treasure.

Rest in peace John Galbraith Graham (1921-2013).

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