In the Dark

Well, I’m now officially on holiday for two weeks and probably won’t be blogging much during this break, especially about work-related things, but I couldn’t resist a quick announcement of something very exciting.

We received confirmation last week that the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC for short) to set up a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT for short) involving the Universities of Cardiff, Bristol and Swansea. This will be coordinated by the Data Innovation Institute at Cardiff University and it covers  a wide range of data-intensive research in astrophysics and cosmology carried on at the three member institutions. ‘Data-intensive’ here means involving very big data sets, very sophisticated analysis methods or high-performance computing,  or any combination of these.

The Centre for Doctoral Training will be coordinated by the Data Innovation Institute at Cardiff University. It will commence in September 2017 so we will be open for applications immediately, ie. next week.

For further information, please see the Data Innovation Institute webpage which will be updated as more details are available.

By the way, for  this special programme, STFC have relaxed the  rules relating to  nationality, so full funding is potentially available for  non-UK citizens under this scheme.

If you’re looking to do a PhD in data-intensive physics or astrophysics, get writing your application now and keep an eye on this page for further announcements.

To secure a PhD place at this STFC CDT administered by the DII you’d better apply PDQ! 

No time for a post today, I’m afraid, so here’s a photograph of a Spectacled Monkey.. 

No time for a post today so I thought I’d share this amazingly clever poem.

OK, so from a literary point of view it’s not the greatest poem ever written, but what’s “amazingly clever” about it is that each individual line is an anagram of the title…

I was looking in my drawers this afternoon and came across this, which is a memento of something that happened 20 years ago. I just missed the anniversary by ten days!

Believe it or not, that’s me at the bottom left sans beard..

I did an item on the Tomorrow’s World Live show – which was not broadcast but performed in front of an audience of a few hundred people in a temporary theatre. In fact there were four shows a day for the period of the event (19-23 March 1997). Each show was only about 30 minutes long, but it was quite hard work as there were many technical things to sort out in between performances.

My role was to do a little piece about the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope and then answer questions on astronomy and cosmology from the audience. I had no script for that bit, as it was impossible to know what would be asked. I answered with varying degrees of success.

Other items featured on the show were a clockwork radio, an  electric sports car, and a device for scrambling an egg without breaking its shell. I couldn’t see the point of the last invention, as one would have to break the shell to eat the egg anyway.

The best bit about being involved in Tomorrow’s World Live was meeting so many of the presenters, all of them proper professionals (unlike me) who were very friendly and helpful. Only two presenters were involved in each show,  and  each pair only did one or two shows, so over the five days I got to work with the whole set, including Craig Doyle, Philippa Forester, Howard Stableford, Vivienne Parry and Shahnaz Pakravan. I didn’t envy them as they had to work not only with amateurs like me, but also had to learn a detailed script and deal with the gadgets. I was relieved that I could basically just wing it.

My clearest memory of the whole event was the technical rehearsal early  in the morning before the very first show. Nothing worked properly, and I was convinced that it was all going to be a complete disaster. Somehow, however, it all came together and there weren’t any major problems in any of the real shows.