November 2008 Archives

Found this via the Craftzine blog. It's a cute little animation on the subject of climate change (and as a knitter it's completely mindboggling the amount of work that went into it!)

In other news, the BBC has another article on how young Britons aren't interested in science. Surprise, surprise, there's a gender imbalance too:

The survey also suggested there was a gender divide: young men were far more interested in new inventions and technology, while young women were attracted to subjects such as the Earth, the environment and the human body.

Now this at least I can vouch for in terms of my own experience. I'm in the process of moving from the engineering and technology dominated field of radio propagation to something more akin to climate modelling. And on the way I've noticed that there is a lot more women working in climate change. I went to a day's introductory course on the Met Office Unified Model and was pleasantly surprised to see the course attendees were pretty much 50:50 male:female split. Nothing at all like the radio courses I've been to, where the ratio was more like 10:1 (or worse).

...I'm sorry! I can blame the recent chaos of computers and networks dying - that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Anyway, besides the usual meetings/teleconferences/writing proposals/etc etc etc that make up my working life at the moment, I've got a few bits of interest for you all.

First up, Frances Downey has written an article for The F-Word, all about ICWiP and women in physics.

Secondly, I've decided to take a more active role in the IoP and am putting myself forward to be an ordinary committee member for the IoP's women in physics group.

And thirdly, I've arranged to give my "I went to ICWiP" talk to anyone who'll show up to listen on the 9th December. The way I see it, a lot of the stuff we talked about at the conference is equally applicable to male physicists (or engineers or mathematicians) as well. And it's one of my hot buttons that childcare keeps being referred to as a women's issue, when it's so blatantly a parents' issue.

Got to run - home time! 

During Anton Zeilinger's visit to the IOP in June we took the opportunity to talk to him about his life, his interests and motivations, and his views on the future of quantum theory and quantum information. Here's the interview:

The Manchester Science Festival took place last week, and the IOP contributed through its Science Butlers, Physics Busking and by having a stall throughout the week.

I was up there on Saturday to man the IOP stall at Arndale Market. The stall was quite curiously located between a nail studio, an afro-hair salon and an Indian head massage place. Despite my initial concerns that not many people might come my way, I'd run out of freebees within ten minutes. Lot's of shoppers were curious to find a physics stall and came up to find out more, sparking many conversations about physics and physics education.