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very debatable but surely different and entertaining - Master Class with Michael O'Leary at the Innovation Convention 2011 - Brussels

issues about the espresso at the EC in Brussels. What about sodexho...

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.

fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."

It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...

How has your country been envisaged ?

The problem is that the light cone angle has a limit - all particles with high momentum (mass x velocity) generate light cones with the same angle. Hence, these particles are indistinguishable. Now Chalmers researcher Philippe Tassin and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have designed a material that manipulates the Cherenkov cone so that also particles with high momentum get a distinct light cone angle too. The work is on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters ("Controlling Cherenkov Radiation with Transformation-Optical Metamaterials").