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> Behold the piece of shit [twitter.com].

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/peo...

19 publications, 2 where she was the first author.

Including this immortal contribution to physics:

Tesh S, Wade J, 2017, 'Look happy dear, you've just made a discovery', PHYSICS WORLD, Vol: 30, Pages: 31-33, ISSN: 0953-8585

Has a fricking Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

because with her 19 pulbications...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

>This includes the IOP Bell-Burnell Award for Women in Physics 2016, IOP Early Career Physics Communicator Prize 2015. This includes award of the Robert Perrin Award for Material Science from the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining. Specifically on criteria 7, Wade was recognized for her achievements by the US state department as the UK representative for the 2017 "Hidden No More" visit, which included representatives from 48 countries world wide

> It is a bit concerning that she created your Wikipedia page and you created hers, and you both work together in the same academic institution?

My rage on world's insanity, as usual, quenched by unexpected humour I found in this.

I'd suggest you take a look at this university's page before you make such categorically incorrect statements.

Just a sample quote: "In recent years, we have set up a group to explore the modes of action of psychedelic drugs on brain activity and connectivity and have performed some of the first human neuroscience studies ever with LSD and psilocybin."

I recently read an article based on an interview with one of their heads of research in which they also mentioned trials involving MDMA, and DMT, in addition to the two in the quote above.

"Microsoft has open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues"

Bounds checking for C and C++ Nov 2004

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-n...
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ici...

At least at $5B I hope that they are building something like the worlds most advanced light source for a new type of fab. It would be an incredibly stupid waste of money to spend that on a pretty building.

Assuming a similar pattern across science and engineering graduates at Cambridge, Oxford, UCL -- isn't it disappointing that 15% of the best graduates apply their skills to ethically-dubious problems? These people (mostly) aren't working on consumer banking, but things like high-frequency trading.

Of my six closest friends from my CS class, who I still meet up with regularly, four work in investment banks (and one at Google, one in science). One is a trader, three write trading software. Considering CS alone, 40-50% of the class works in finance!

The shortage is artificial - the jobs are written such as to take advantage of foreign workers and not hire many of the plentiful in-country ones.

This is unlikely to be the problem in the UK -- it's no different to employ a British person than a Portugese, Polish or Bulgarian one.

I think it's the pay. I went to Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, and was disappointed to see how many of my peers went to work in a bank or in finance. (roughly 15%). And those should be some of that year's best engineering/science graduates.

Yes, because sedans roll over all the time~

With the Volvo solution you have the same center of gravity a current volvos
They are lighter - more distance
They charge quickly - I can't find how much more quickly, but they aren't chemical so I expect it to be much quicker.

As a bonus. Hitting a piece of metal on the road won't lead to the car bursting in flames.

a better article:
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_5-2-2010-10-26-39

So far I'm not sure they can even simulate a paramecium, amoeba or white blood cells 100%. These single celled creatures do quite fancy stuff given their limited senses and physical abilities. Watch these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_14-9-2011-8-51-31

Perhaps we should first work out how these things do what they do. Then go to neurons then scale up. After all can we honestly say we know for sure that a white blood cell is much stupider than a worm, insect or fish?

Thinking you understand how neurons or single celled creatures work just by statistics and averages of their outputs is like thinking you understand how humans think just by statistics of their outputs. You might be able to guess what a human might do on a daily basis most of the time but that's not true understanding.

If you don't really know what you're doing you might create something that seems like a human 95+% of the time, but the crucial 5% or 1% of the time it doesn't actually think like a human. After all most humans don't really think much most of the time ;).

Givewell evaluates charities and they recommend two charities, Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). Another good charity is Marie Stopes International, a family planning provider.

A lot of people are holding forth on why economic models are wrong, but few comments are related to the actual subject of the article. (By the way, unless I missed something, the article itself is very vague on what work is done. I think it may be referring to this Jonathan Carter, and the research findings may be related to this 2005 paper.

The article is about the following situation: you have a model (statistical model, computer simulation, etc.) that you want to use for prediction. It has some "knobs" (parameters) that you can twiddle to change its output; this is necessary because the settings of these knobs are often unknown a-priori. So people "tune" or "fit" or "calibrate" the model to observed data to determine the parameter settings in order to make predictions.

A problem occurs if there are many different "knob settings" that cause the model to behave similarly on past observed data. Statisticians call this an "identifiability problem" (since you can't hope to identify the true value of the parameters from the observed data. Ecologists call it "equifinality", since there are many equally good ways to reach the same final outcome. And engineers call it "multimodality", where the fit of the model has many local minima. (Or you could get a whole "ridge" in parameter space that is equally good everywhere along the ridge crest.)

In such circumstances, you can't determine the true values of the parameters very well, even if the model is perfect. This isn't about imperfections in the numerical model, or in the mathematical theory. It's an inherent consequence of the relationship some models have with the data.

This also is not a consequence of imprecise data. There is always some uncertainty about model parameters given noisy data, so you'll never determine the true value of parameters exactly. But this isn't what it means to be non-identifiable.

An example of the real problem of non-identifiability: suppose your model is y = (A+B) * x + error. It's pretty clear that if you measure y and x, all you can hope to determine is the linear combination A+B, and not A or B individually, even if you have perfect data. (That is, unless you have some additional source of information to constrain their values other than y and x.)

The above is a case of perfect non-identifiability. Other models are just "nearly" non-identifiable (e.g., they have "almost flat" ridges in parameter space). Then you can identify the parameters eventually, but only with unusually good data, or multiple data constraints. As an example of the latter, you could observe one quantity that constrains the parameters to a ridge in parameter space, and another quantity that constrains the parameters to a perpendicular ridge, and the intersection of the ridges is well constrained. (Think of an "X" shape, or something like this figure, except the ellipses are stretched into ridges extending across the whole parameter space).

Non-identifiability is sometimes a problem for prediction, and sometimes not. The issue is that different parameter values can be consistent with the same data. If this relationship also holds into the future, then it may not matter: you might not know what the true value of a parameter is, but if all the allowed parameter settings lead to the same predictions, maybe you don't care if you get the parameters themselves wrong.

However, the relationship may not hold into the future: parameter settings that give similar predictions for historical data may lead to very different predictions for the future. This is the real problem, and it can't necessarily be solved with better data if the model is truly non-identifiable. Then you have to simply prepare for the wide range of possible outcomes.

What the article doesn't make clear is that not all models have this problem.

A specific example: Oxford

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/computer_science/computer_science_.html

Cambridge is a less good example because in the first year they make you do other stuff:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/intro/

(20 years ago or so, CS didn't exist in the first year, so you had to apply to do something else then change subjects. Now you can spend _part_ of your first year
doing it.)

Imperial College, London:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ugprospectus/facultiesanddepartments/computing/computingcourses

And how about Pisa:

http://www.di.unipi.it/

The group's website has a nice webpage with a description for non-physicists and another, which assumes some physics, and shows which of the competing theories they hope to rule out (or confirm) by making these measurements. Have a look at the diagram here.

From the Nature article, they have put a limit of 10.5 x 10^-27 e cm, or about 1 x 10^-26 e cm, which is a good chunk better than the previous result of 1.6 x 10^-26 e cm. What's more exciting, is that this is a different technique, and has the potential to do much much better. Keep up the good work guys!

By the way, they're using a ytterbium fluoride molecule, because one electron in this finds itself in a state which is very sensitive to the effect they're interested in. (There are other candidate molecules, but this group went with YbF.) They use Ramsey's method of separated oscillating fields to measure a very small frequency shift when they change the electric field the molecule is in. This is just about the most accurate method by which we can measure anything, and is the basis for (all but the most recent) atomic clocks.

The group's website has a nice webpage with a description for non-physicists and another, which assumes some physics, and shows which of the competing theories they hope to rule out (or confirm) by making these measurements. Have a look at the diagram here.

From the Nature article, they have put a limit of 10.5 x 10^-27 e cm, or about 1 x 10^-26 e cm, which is a good chunk better than the previous result of 1.6 x 10^-26 e cm. What's more exciting, is that this is a different technique, and has the potential to do much much better. Keep up the good work guys!

By the way, they're using a ytterbium fluoride molecule, because one electron in this finds itself in a state which is very sensitive to the effect they're interested in. (There are other candidate molecules, but this group went with YbF.) They use Ramsey's method of separated oscillating fields to measure a very small frequency shift when they change the electric field the molecule is in. This is just about the most accurate method by which we can measure anything, and is the basis for (all but the most recent) atomic clocks.

We now have four rectors that needs to be cooled down, built in and kept under close watch for a couple of hundred thousands of years.

Try switching to these four rectors instead then. They look pretty cooled down from here, and I seriously doubt they'll be around for a thousand days, never mind years.

I suggest reading the original paper. The theoretical machinery used is 4D and fully (spacetime) relativistic. If you can't cope with the physics literature, the press releases are more complete than the mangled stuff in the press (but the New Scientist isn't bad at all: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19727-how-to-cloak-a-crime-in-a-beam-of-light.html) Press release (Imperial) : http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_16-11-2010-9-5-43 Press Release (IoP): http://www.iop.org/news/nov10/page_45311.html . Regarding the chicken analogy, see http://www.qols.ph.ic.ac.uk/~kinsle/files/STcloak/

From here

You do not need to have taken A-level Computing or ICT to do the degree. We look for people who are good at Maths and are excited by computing and its many applications and are or have the potential to be great problem-solvers, lateral-thinkers or systematic thinkers. We welcome people with a wide variety of A-level subjects for our course.

(their emphasis)

And Further Maths is on here.

From here

You do not need to have taken A-level Computing or ICT to do the degree. We look for people who are good at Maths and are excited by computing and its many applications and are or have the potential to be great problem-solvers, lateral-thinkers or systematic thinkers. We welcome people with a wide variety of A-level subjects for our course.

(their emphasis)

And Further Maths is on here.

Many universities in the UK have specialised courses like this.

Type "game" in here and click search, there are 279 courses. Most of them aren't at well-renowned institutions, and the degree content reflects this.

You would probably be better off going for a computer science degree and focusing your electives on courses that would help with video game design, as well as trying to get internships at video game companies.

Some of them are still good -- for instance, where I went there was Computing, Computing (AI), Computing (Software Engineering) and a few other options. They were all broadly the same, except if you wanted the extra words you had to take certain courses. If you didn't, your degree would be Computing but you'd have no disadvantage. Looking at that list, I did all the courses for "MEng Computing (Games, Vision and Interaction)", but my degree is "MEng Computing" (and that's the way I like it).

If a professor wanted students to interact, they would be handing out notes, instead of requiring everyone to focus on writing them.

All the computing lecturers at my university handed out notes (either PDFs or printed). It was still a good idea to annotate the notes, but very few students bothered with a laptop.

IME, having a valuable and desirable object in your bag is a hassle, compared to having 30 sheets of printed paper and a few pens, and the minor benefits aren't really worth it. I was never especially worried about leaving my bag somewhere while I did something else (use toilet, go and get food, go to the pub, etc) but I wouldn't have wanted to leave a laptop in an unattended bag.

Cost is first, this is built on top of carbon fiber which is already pretty damn expensive without also turning it into a battery. Yea, one day they may bring the cost down, but it is not in the reasonable future.

TFA is a summary 3 links removed from the original (and vastly more informative) press release:
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_5-2-2010-10-26-39

The researchers say that the composite material that they are developing, which is made of carbon fibres and a polymer resin, will store and discharge large amounts of energy much more quickly than conventional batteries. In addition, the material does not use chemical processes, making it quicker to recharge than conventional batteries. Furthermore, this recharging process causes little degradation in the composite material, because it does not involve a chemical reaction, whereas conventional batteries degrade over time.
...
...The team will improve the material's mechanical properties by growing carbon nanotubes on the surface of the carbon fibres, which should also increase the surface area of the material, which would improve its capacity to store more energy.

They are also planning to investigate the most effective method for manufacturing the composite material at an industrial level.

The 3-year European Union funded project includes researchers from...

So in 3 years we'll find out whether or not this technology is going to be plausibly brought down to the consumer level.

Read the article.

Researchers from Imperial College London and their European partners, including Volvo Car Corporation, are developing a prototype material which can store and discharge electrical energy and which is also strong and lightweight enough to be used for car parts.

Now, take your foot out of your mouth, and enjoy the following quote:

"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities." -David Hume

I'm living proof that slashdot is mostly full of arrogant people who enjoy misinformed and cynical deconstruction above all else.

Physorg is a tarpit. Here's the REAL original article.

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_5-2-2010-10-26-39

It seems they are decommissioning it (though I don't know if they're replacing it, or whether there are any other small reactors like it in the UK).

"The document may no longer be available, however."

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/18619743.PDF

Bless you WD, for being enlightened and motivated ... Hey, what do you think about this http://www.hqrd.hitachi.co.jp/arle/optical.cfm http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/genri-2.html http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/index.html http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research/photonics/research/topics/tomog/tomog.htm http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Arridge/ToastOverview.html http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/research/borg/research/topography/index.htm

The nearest Borg building I've seen is this one, (another pic). Looks awesome at night too!

It's the Faculty Building at Imperial College, unfortunately not a datacentre :-(

Good multiple choice questions must be hard to construct! I'd prefer numerical answers to phrases though, there's no problem with understanding what they're supposed to mean. I remembered another reason why my Chief Examiner teacher hated multiple choice questions -- he said it simply wasn't right to print incorrect information on the exam paper, on principle. (Let the pupils write it in afterwards...)

I just had a look, my uni is 3rd in most of the tables, but 2nd in the one by the Sutton trust and 4th in last year's Sunday Times. (And a moment's look will tell anyone who cares that I'm at Imperial College).

She then emigrated to the remote end of Ireland, where for 30 years or so she taught IT and computing a the local RTC (Regional Tech College.) She was telling me fairly recently that the level of casual sexism, and the air of intimidation and of it being a male domain meant that whereas 10 or 15 years ago there were actually more women/girls on the courses than men, it was now overwhelmingly male dominated. Of course she's done what she can to push that back and keep it open to women but... she's just retired.

:(

The identity of the brain scan, in the main College entrance - a closely guarded secret until now - was revealed before The Queen departed. "The Queen asked whose brain it was and Jo Hajnal said 'it's mine,'" said Danish artist, Per Arnoldi, who worked with the professor, an imaging scientist at the Hammersmith campus, to create the visualisation.

Look for positions in derivatives pricing or risk management (usually called Quants) in a investment bank or hedge fund. You will need to have a strong background in probability theory and stochastic processes and learn about the principals of finance. You will probably need to do at least a masters (I took this course: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/mathfin -- there are similar ones in the USA).

To get a feel for the subject I recommend "The Mathematics of Financial Markets" by Elliott and Kopp and "Options, Futures and Other Derivatives" by Hull.

If you really want to go after the money, finance is currently your best choice.

Good luck.

Like most reporting of detailed but interesting science, this one gets it way wrong. Take a look here for a better summary.

The question that was actually being addressed by this research is whether speciation in asexual organisms works the way it does in sexual species. A sexual species in a new environment can separate into new species by adaptations to different niches. It happened with the cichlid fish in Lake Victoria, it happened with the Galapagos finches, and there are lots of other examples.

It's really an interesting question with clonal lines like the rotifers. Since there's no gene mixing between organisms, it's surprising that environmental selection alone would be sufficient to keep the traits similar enough that multiple lines could be seen as the same species after a long time. But that's what's happened here. The rotifers living on water lice diverged into two separate groups, but I think you would expect either much more divergence (as each line accumulates different mutations) or much less (as there might not be enough variation for selection to work with).

Bdelloid rotifers have been known for a long time, and known to be asexual. The bit about "discovering" them was just a gross distortion of the original article.

I have a somewhat balanced view of this, as I work for a University and have a variety of different interactions with Solaris and Linux. What follows is a few notes on Linux vs. Solaris and Access Rights across different categories of system

Firstly, our Production MIS Systems:

Almost without exception, these run on Solaris on Sparc. Why is this? Simply because it is very very very reliable and the support contract is excellent. Ours runs on SunFire and midrange stuff like 1280s and 890s for the backend DB with a variety of frontends from Netras to 490s.

Show me a linux machine (apart from an HP superdome possibly, but that's Itanic) that you can partition into multiple physical systems, has 6 power supplies, has the possibility of over 100 CPU cores in a physical partition, can have hardware swapped in and out live and so on and I bet you it will have a pricetag like a SunFire. I am aware that a cluster of linux machines could do the same job for less buck, but for this stuff it's much more effective to have one very large highly resilient and available server.

We do use sudo; The production DBAs can Sudo as environment users and the admins (there is more than one because unlike some poster I just read I think a single key to the kingdom is a very bad idea - but then our team has already had one auto-accident death this year.) can Sudo to root. This is purely for a tracking point of view - we could have passwords for the root and application users and let people su, but it's harder to manage. They probably could use some shennanigans to get themselves a root shell if they really tried, but we'd see them because we have good (live) log monitoring and we trust them not to jeapordise their own jobs.

Nextly, our Development MIS Systems

Some of these run on Linux (RedHat Enterprise on HP hardware if you must know), Some of them run on Solaris. Typically the ones that are developing for things that talk to existing Solaris stuff stay Solaris, new stuff goes to Linux.

The reasons for this are manyfold - but they mainly hinge around the fact that Dev systems need not be highly resilient so the bang:buck ratio for Linux on HP is better than Solaris on Sun.

Sudo gets more relaxed here - our full-time (as opposed to Contract) DBAs are allowed to Sudo to root and we watch what they are doing a little less carefully. The rationale we have as sysadmins is we don't care what they are doing on our dev system (we can rebuild the OS in minutes, if they've fscked Oracle, that's their problem); Provided they can rebuild the code in Test and DR environments consistently and documentably as part of the project deliverables, we will release it into Production.

Thirdly, Academic Development Systems

Note that I am distinguishing between MIS and Academic systems... screwups in the former cost us money, the latter may cost us Grant money in the long run but at least Payroll still goes through. Think of Academic Development as the systems people write real code on (as opposed to tinkering with Databases or SQL).

These systems mostly (if they need *nix at all) run on Linux. Flavor depends on the moment and the supplier, but there's only two Research Groups out of all the departments in College still using Suns and Solaris, and that's only because their big-money code won't yet run on Linux.

Our access rights policy is something along the lines of: sysadmins and grant owner get to do what they like. Unfortunately I as a sysadmin don't get the right to tell Professor X that he can't have full access to his £Ymillion system, so he gets the same kind of access we do with appropriate disclaimers about how we'll charge

How about 100 GB of storage capacity for the cost of a memory card ? Magnetic microchips used in cell phones could make them fully functional video cameras. In addition, the chips are non-volatile, so startup lag will become a not-so-fond memory. They use much less power than electronic chips. They can be made much smaller, possibly as small as a few atoms. The examples they have already fabricated "use no silicon and require no multilayer processing and so can be manufactured at very low cost on flexible substrates, while offering non-volatility, radiation hardness and several hundreds of MHz of bandwidth" . They're talking about plastic chips. Pretty impressive.

The technology, which is still being developed, can be classified as "nanotech" and is called "magnetic domain-wall logic" and is based on spintronics. Lots of folks are working on this because many believe that spintronics will allow for great advances in areas from quantum computing to DNA based molecular electronic devices. This particular development is important because it represents the first actual construction of logic gates, which are the basis of computing. So far the group has produced a "NOT gate" and a "11-stage serial shift register / digital frequency divider" in a 200nm design rule. They have also demonstrated the transfer of magnetic information without the use of magnetic fields. This paves the way for hybrid chips with both electronic and spintronic components. Such "3D chips" could contain many times the amount of information possible with current electronic chips. They will run cooler, with short "nanowire" pathways, and have the potential to surpass the performance of silicon chips. Moore's Law marches on.

billy - wonder if the "$100 laptop" guys have their phone number?

Imperial College has single signon to RedHat Enterprise Linux using Windows 2003 as a KDC. We're working on OpenAFS, but it doesn't play nicely with the ticket types you get from a Windows2003 KDC.

Very true, and not just in the US. I went to IC in the UK and the CS department run their own networks (very well I might add) as a seperate entity from the college-wide ICT who were largely a joke (when I was there anyway).

I call myself an engineer because I am a Master of Engineering, according to my University's Faculty of Engineering.

But maybe they're wrong.

I call myself an engineer because I am a Master of Engineering, according to my University's Faculty of Engineering.

But maybe they're wrong.