Research: EuResist

Recently I've become involved with an EU research project entitled EuResist, which is an international collaborative effort whose goal is to create a system to predict patient response to HIV -- a radical direction change from my usual meteorology/statistics research! As it happens, I joined a multidisciplinary team here at Kingston University (KU) where I'm the "technical" guy (general databases, statistics, software, maths) in a team containing a microbiologist, a social/sports scientist and a statistician plus a PhD student doing the work. The social scientist was responsible for getting KU involved in the project; we three joined at the last minute when the project started and she realised she couldn't do the work alone.

The project had a successful meeting in Stockholm last week (beautiful city) where the microbiologist and myself presented the preliminary work done by the student, but primarily we were asking for clarification as to what our role in the project is. Happily we now know and will be able to make progress...

So why mention this here? Because (a) it's an example of the pressure lecturers are under to do collaborative research in addition to a full teaching load and (b) it happens to provide a bad example of cooperation & leadership for me to moan about  :

Our coordinator, the social scientist, accepted the project in summer 2005. It was only in January 2006 that she realised she needed a team to provide the necessary skills, so at the last minute (literally, 3 days over a weekend before the initial "kickoff" meeting) she asked the microbiologist, who asked me and I asked the statistician to join in. We (3 newbies) refused to rush to the kickoff meeting unprepared, and she refused to go too, so the team at KU was pretty-much left to our own devices until last week.

Moreover, 3 weeks ago the social scientist mentioned in a meeting with the PhD student how she "had been trying to get rid of the project since August"! (a) How demotivating for the student and (b) how underhand -- she never mentioned this when she roped us in but wants to step back, keep the kudos of having brought in the project, presumably get her name on publications, but do no work plus leave the administration for the remaining 3 of us to do!

As I said, bad cooperation and leadership; we'll see what we can do to keep her involved...

@media 2006

Five words are sufficient to describe this year's @media conference: even better than last year! Let's leave it at that for now...

Marking hell 2006

I've been too busy to blog for ages (too much work!) but had to 'share' this: It's that time of year again (marking hell: 2004, 2005), now 2006 but rather than moan about how much I have to do (I do!) I was momentarily amused by some indecipherable hand writing in my Databases and the Web exam ... what the student wrote is "this stage is about the layingaut the links" and what amused me was that he was probably thinking "laying out" but wrote using joined-up letters "layingaut" which is probably exactly as he'd pronounce it! OK, I am sad...

(Reminds me of my dad's favourite anecdote from years of A-level marking: One paper a couple of years ago had the same squiggle at the end of many lines. After pondering what the student was trying to say he realised that at the end of every sentence rather than finishing with a full-stop/period character the student wrote innit! I kid you not...)

The First Smiley :-)

Who says Microsoft staff don't have a nerdy sense of humour -- they found the first smiley :-) !

Now, who's wasted more money with this: them, for doing the research, or me for posting to my blog? Considering my salary & the industrial dispute surrounding it ;-) I reckon it's them!