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what an interesting personality ... very symathetic Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize - and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 7

And the follow up by Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals

interesting one - Luzi will like it :-)

A simple mathematical model of the way cultures spread reproduces some aspects of European history, say complexity scientists

The guidance counselor at my high school discouraged me to study physics but was very excited when I was contemplating to become a teacher. Maybe I should send her this article...

Oh yeah, real new!! And in the 90s it was obvious that girls are smarter but discriminated, today its obvious that the poor boys are neglected; some years ago female teachers were proven to discriminate even stronger against girls than male teachers and today politicians demand more male teachers... because they would pay more attention to the neglected boys! Great, that's what I like about sociological research, every couple of years one can sell the same old story again and again and again... sorry, I'm in a real bullshitter mood today!

gotta agree with luzi here. girls at secondary school in the UK have been outperforming boys for years now after numerous government programmes. As to guidance counsellors - if they were any good at guidance wouldn't they have better jobs?

"University of Copenhagen fired seismologist Hans Thybo, president of the European Geosciences Union. The official explanation for Thybo's dismissal - his alleged use of private e-mail for work, and telling a postdoc that it is legitimate to openly criticize university management - seems petty in the extreme."

archaeology for a bit of a change of pace. "The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history's first 'barbarians' - mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world's first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq."

nice blog!

An opinion piece by an ex-Googler, talking, among other things, about how corporate culture is creeping into Google. I've highlighted some snippets which I've found eerily familiar :)

What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars-our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history. The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes-execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate.

Now this would be really cool if it had a brain computer interface and could be controlled by a trained drummer's mind! Science and Technology Society and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have built a wearable robotic limb that allows drummers to play with three arms. The two-foot long "smart arm" can be attached to a musician's shoulder. It responds to human gestures and the music it hears.

interesting workshop on language here in Leiden ... Luis, Giusi??

interesting indeed, but the lectures I'd be interested in already took place

No good, 80% of these people are top quoted in my research area... I really should have been there. Evidently the organisers need to work on advertising.

For those working on space debris removal... Watch out for moon-protection activists that will accuse you of distroying a historical heritage: "There are countless places on Earth that have been awarded protection to preserve their historic or cultural importance. The moon has none. But that may be about to change...."

Google Books measurements of word frequencies on 15 million books (12% of all the books ever published). More about it in:  - Google Opens Books to New Cultural Studies - John Bohannon, Science 2010-12-17 - Slashdot: Google Books Makes a Word Cloud of Human History - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info

nice article on Russian Mars exploration pioneers ...

very nice article ... and we need a new word for this!

How Google finally makes its money, we were having this discussion some time ago