Wasn't taking traffic off the central line a motivation from the start for Cross rail? This might be another reason why TFL is prioritising other lines over the central.
I worked with someone (this is in astronomy) who said that papers in nature were the most likely to be wrong. They are in nature because they have a dramatic (new/unexpected) result. One good reason for a new/unexpected result is a mistake somewhere.
Edit: I'm not saying anything about this paper. I know nothing about this. Just a meta comment that, in really hard to get published in journals, there might be a bi-modality of papers. Really important and really wrong :)
This is correct. Think of nature as a journal that publishes papers with a high rate of false positives (claims that turn out to be untrue) on purpose,to intentionally stimulate the state of the art of science.
I have actively ignored Nature and Science papers for my entire career (with the exception of my one Nature publication, and W&C 1953 of course).
It likely says something that, as an epidemiologist, the only way I've ever gotten a paper into Nature/Science is during a scary infectious disease epidemic. The rest of the time, they're largely uninterested.
This is true in principle, but in practice my experience is you have to have an extraordinarily good CV to get funding without a masters degree. Natural science bias in my friendship group though.
That said, a masters degree in the UK is much less of an undertaking than many other countries. Level of independent research in my "combined" masters (4 yr course, usually taken as 1st degree), pales in comparison to what colleagues in mainland Europe had to do.
This as a fairly recent occurrence in my research group. It’s often quite tedious because you don’t want to waste the money and it’s never clear if there’s going to be a period where we’re short on cash at some point in the future. most of it’s spent on boring but expensive things to be used down the line. Would be far better if funding wasn’t quite so cyclical!
By contrast I work in a field (experimental plasma physics) where there are relatively few industrial opportunities. For grad students in my field who wish to carry on working in science once they graduate, there are few options outside of academia.
My parents are both PHDs in physics and professors etc, but I knew 15 years ago how hard it would be get a decent job in the field and didn’t pursue sciences.
So I don’t really have much sympathy for grad students who complain about having lack of opportunities.
I would say that when I started my PhD (aged 22) I didn't think about career prospects in the way I do now. I'm not complaining about my situation -- I love my job.
I suppose my point is that people know what the job market is like in abstract from the beginning, appreciating the actuality of it is something which requires more maturity than is present in many (most?) PhD applicants.
Agreed. The world is much harsher now and jobs in most industries are not secure, I didn’t want to sound harsh in my post (and it wasn’t directed at you in any way since it was clear from your post that you had something), but the reality is young students need to think carefully about their job prospects at an earlier stage than they did before.
Further, the incentives are misaligned. I wonder if we (USA) restored government funding for higher ed, would college programs be more honest about graduation rates and job placements.
In a crude sense, more career options swing the relationship in favor of the employees vs employers, so it can be used as a guideline for whether a career will be rewarding and fairly compensated.
I would argue people in academics are on average harder workers than other fields, so overall they have it a bit tougher given all the work they put in. There are successes in every field, I am just making some vast generalizations for our discussion :-)
Yes, because a 25 year old has the same maturity and life experience as a 40 year old (or similar age numbers). How dare the young make decisions that from the point of view of someone with much more experience looks silly?
Also, the assumption is faulty that brains are like computers and processing identical information using a non-diseased fully functioning brain should obviously give the same result regardless of age.
If you go into a drug gang, you also know going in that conditions for the lower-rung "associates" are poor.
To be less flippant: While it's better that you at least know you're getting screwed, that doesn't make fair. It is justified and worthwhile to struggle to change the conditions of employment, even if you agreed to them and knew them going in.
I don’t disagree. It’s at a crude level and its obviously quite difficult when you are young and still haven’t fully formed a view of the world and the direction it’s headed in. But the signs were there — this is at least as far back as 2005 when I graduated. Even in the early 00s, it wasn’t an easy situation and my guess is from even before. Science has always been a difficult field to crack into.
I wonder if fields like physics are just to broad and we should be more specific? And that physics/biology/maths etc. will just become a precursor to other fields.
If you assume that accelerator technology remains the same then you do of course have to keep making your accelerators bigger. There are a fairly large number of people working on plasma accelerators which are more compact because they support a greater accelerating potential. The AWAKE experiment [1] is an example of such a project.
As an aside, I think this is a great example of a role which fundamental science plays in society: It can facilitate step changes in technological progress.
I'm curious what the motivation for putting this report together was. Some ideas:
- Create interest in company to aid recruitment
- For fun
- Client paid them to do this (seems unlikely)
It's technical advertising and probably they wrote it as part of a bigger project which a customer paid them to do it. If you wrote the white paper which was used to teach the officer. The officer is going to assume technical competence and better trust you on other technical aspects.
A person I with used to work for the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment. Apparently their former employer’s preferred method of disabling the camera on a MacBook was to break the lens using a nail and hammer...
