The Cabbages of Doom

I’m deep in grant- and lecture-writing at the moment (hence the lack of posts) but the QS World University rankings are out for 2013/2014 and UNSW is ranked 50^th in Biological Sciences. Obviously, I haven’t been there long enough to have contributed to this but still good news and worth a mention! Overall, UNSW was ranked 52^nd.

Pretty good result for the University of Southampton at 86 too. (U. Sydney is 38^th but you can’t have everything! :op)

I am not entirely sure whether MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have any tangible benefits to the participants (or the hosting institution beyond publicity). Nevertheless, there is no denying that they represent excellent value for money (being free!) and are a great opportunity to learn some really interesting things.

If oceans are your thing and you have a bit of spare time in February and March then check out the Exploring our Oceans MOOC being run by Oceanography at the University of Southampton:

In this six week interactive course, you will see how the ocean depths are no longer out of reach and how they are connected to our everyday lives. We will engage you in our most recent expedition findings and share our knowledge on the least touched areas of our oceans.

Together we’ll look at the animals that swim in these dark waters, the creatures that live on the seabed and the makeup of the underwater environment they live in.

Visit the Exploring our Oceans MOOC page for more details - or to sign up!

Having a few minutes to kill at the airport, I thought it was fitting (and easy!) to leave a quick blog post about the last place we stayed in Southampton (having sold the house back in September): Number 10 on Landguard Road, Southampton. It’s run by the same people who run the excellent Mayfair Guest House across the road (#1 in Southampton on Tripadvisor!), where we also stayed a couple of nights.

Time is short, and I am lazy, so here is my Trip Advisor review:

Excellent self-catering accommodation in Southampton

We feel lucky to have found Number 10. We stayed here for our last two weeks in Southampton prior to moving abroad and it was exactly what we needed.

We stayed in one of the “standard rooms” with a shared bathroom. The room was big and well presented, as in the website photos. There are two standard rooms sharing two bathrooms, so we never had to wait to use the facilities. The bathrooms themselves are kept very clean and the showers are superb! Other shared facilities are great. The kitchen is well-equipped and each room has its own locked cupboard. Laundry facilities etc. are also good and seem sufficient for the number of guests.

The owners of Number 10 (who run the Mayfair Guesthouse B&B over the road) are extremely friendly and helpful; they made us very welcome and looked after us well but never felt intrusive.

The accommodation is very well situated, close to the train station and the city centre. It’s also a great price for what you get - a lot cheaper than a serviced apartment, for example. All things considered, Number 10 is ideal for someone moving to/from Southampton or visiting for a couple of weeks.

For anyone from the University of Southampton (and Solent, for that matter,) I reckon this place would be great for visiting academics or arriving postdocs etc.

Having said (a temporary) goodbye to the cats, we had to find a new home for most of our cat paraphanalia. This was partly because some items are not allowed to be imported into Australia and partly because the plan is to be reunited with the cats before all of our shipped possessions have necessarily turned up.

Happily, much of it proved useful to Barbara’s Cat Rescue, from whence our two cats Mia and Arthur originally came. Shortly afterwards, I came across the leaflet that she gave us when we first got them:

Barabara is pretty amazing. As far as I can tell, she has pretty much dedicated her retirement - and house! - to looking after rescue (and stray) kitties of all kinds. It was really nice to be able to give something back after all this time - and to be able to report how well Mia and Arthur were doing, four and a half years on.

If you live in the Southampton area and are thinking of getting a cat, please think of Barbara’s Cat Rescue. Perhaps we lucked out by getting such sweet cats but we’re really glad that we adopted.

When I went to unlock the shed last weekend, I found this guy had set up residence in and around the padlock. Being in the south of England, I just admired the beautiful little critter. If the same thing happens to me once we've moved to Sydney, I think I might respond a little differently!

I thought I should balance out my last post giving out about coffee on the Jonathan Swift by endorsing some surprisingly good coffee on the go. Last Saturday was the Southampton Kite Festival. Our friends, the Flying Fish Kiting Team, were performing so we went down to lend some support. (And a good performance it was too! Sadly, the weather was not quite so good, so no pictures this year.)

As well as the kite skills of Flying Fish (and their four-man team, L-Katz,) one of the impressive highlights of the day was the coffee from the Cafe2u mobile coffee van that was there. (Last year's culinary stand-out, Biggles Donuts, were not there, sadly.) Proper, freshly made coffee, and not ridiculously overpriced. (I also like the smiling running coffee bean on their logo!)

Around this time last year, the sad news came out that South Korean textbook publishers were removing examples of evolution following pressure from Creationists. [Soo Bin Park (2012) South Korea surrenders to creationist demands. Nature 486:14.] One of the examples to be dropped was Archaeopteryx, on the grounds that it might not be an ancestral bird after all. I am not sure how they will respond to last week's news that recent research puts Archaeopteryx back in the bird lineage, as opposed to being "just another feathered dinosaur". (Just‽)

The study in question, A Jurassic avialan dinosaur from China resolves the early phylogenetic history of birds [Godefroit et al., Nature (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12168], describes a 170-million-year-old fossil (below). Twenty million years or so older than Archaeopteryx, Aurornis xui is touted as the earliest definite early bird. (Artist's reconstruction, above.) Furthermore, the traits it shared by the two seem to put Archaeopteryx fully back within the ancestral avian lineage.

The authors include one of my Southampton colleagues, Gareth Dyke, and you can hear him discuss the paper on the Nature Podcast at the Nature News article, New contender for first bird. You can also read a summary in the Science news of the week - Science 340:1024-1025, Earliest Birdie? [Pictures from the linked Nature and Science news items.]

Of course, whether or not Archaeopteryx is an ancestral bird or not, that does not alter the irrefutable fact that birds did evolve from dinosaurs. The real solution to the challenge by Creationists should not have been to take Archaeopteryx out of the textbook but to put more fossils into the textbook. Teach the actual "controversy", such as it is: from which dinosaurs did birds evolve?

The UK has become a bit of a nation of League Tables and Higher Education is no exception, with the National Student Survey (NSS) and national University rankings becoming increasingly important in student recruitment and general reputation.

"Quality Assurance" (QA), as it's known in the business, is clearly very important. There should be ways of ensuring that teaching quality remains high, especially in (predominantly) publicly-funded systems like the UK. I'm not convinced that surveys and league tables are the way to do this, though. The problem with any assessment as a method of encouraging good quality is that you have to make sure that what you are assessing actually matches quality. Otherwise, all you do is encourage successful game-playing to maximise performance metrics. (This is particularly true of the "Research Excellence Framework", sadly, which is directing a ton of time and resources away from doing excellent research.)

With all the hoop-jumping that goes along with league tables, it is easy to lose sight of what is really important in terms of teaching quality - the actual learning experience of the students - and the fact that, despite most individual performance metrics for academics being research-related, most lecturers care about that learning experience. It was really nice, therefore, to discover that the Southampton University Student's Union (SUSU) has started its own Excellence in Teaching Awards to recognise members of staff that have gone the extra mile.

It was great to see so many of my colleagues in Biological Sciences among the nominees and I felt pretty chuffed to be nominated for a "Contribution to Academic Support" award. (I didn't win!) I've seen some of the lengths my fellow academics go to in order to maintain quality teaching despite growing numbers and shrinking resources and it's lovely to know that the students appreciate the effort. Nice one, SUSU!

Although it's not quite formalised yet, Southampton has just announced an new Masters in Research course to start in October 2013. The MRes Wildlife Conservation is a joint venture between the University of Southampton and Marwell zoo, and represents a pretty unique opportunity (in the UK at least) to work closely with an active conservation organisation in the UK or Africa.

Result!         [Photos from my September 2010 Marwell Zoo album.]

On Friday, a new star of the wine world was revealed to me. Beyerskloof Pinotage Reserve 2009 has joined Roaring Meg Pinot Noir as a wine worth remembering - and paying full price for! :op Unlike Meg, though, it's a real bargain at under £14!

The discovery was made at a particularly good tasting of the University of Southampton Wine Club, "Cape Wines", which featured eight excellent South African wines. (All available from SA Wines.) The Beyerskloof Pinotage Reserve 2009 was the last wine of the night and the star of the show (for me) but all eight wines were very palatable. Affordable too! (The most expensive one was still under £20 - and actually my least favourite of the night.)

A couple of the other reds were also worthy of a mention: the Rustenberg Syrah 2009 and Simonsig Frans Malan Reserve 2007. As one might expect, all three were big and bold, just the way I like my red wine, although the Simonsig had a rather disappointing finish.

I had been expecting to enjoy the reds but the whites were also surprisingly good. The Groot Constantia Sauvignon Blanc 2011 was pleasant but unspectacular - a bit disappointing for a New World Sauvignon Blanc fan. The Vergelegen Chardonnay Reserve 2011, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise: lightly buttery but crisp. I'm not generally one for Chardonnay but I'd happily have this one again.
The final notable wine of the night was the least spectacular but worth remembering all the same, which was the opener - a Graham Beck Brut NV. I am not a great champagne drinker but this one was very pleasant and at £12.99 definitely one to note for next time I need something bubbly.

All-in-all, a great evening with some great wines - and eight more reasons to go wine tasting in the Western Cape!

When it is wet and windy, walking to work can be quite unpleasant. On a snowy day like yesterday, however, it is a joy! I am lucky enough to have a walk to work that traverses Southampton Common and could therefore really enjoy some snowy trees and (at that point) unspoilt blankets of snow.

Thanks to my touchscreen gloves, I was able to snap away quite happily on my iPhone without even getting cold hands! It also gave me a good chance to try out the "panaroma" function of my iPhone - something that my wife mentioned to me (as I had somehow overlooked it completely) but not yet tried out.

It took me a couple of attempts to get it right but I am pretty impressed and pleased with the results. (You can see more on Google+.) They're a bit small here but hopefully will open bigger OK. (I might need to find a different way to get them into blogger that doesn't resize on the largest dimension.)


Top: Southmapton Common. Middle: Southampton University.
Bottom: Building 85 (Life Sciences) and surrounds
The University got shut in the afternoon due to the snow and the students (and staff?) were able to let off a bit of steam by building snowmen, including this giant in the "plaza" outside Building 85 (right).

There was even more snowman construction going on in Southampton Common on the way back home. One group were even building an igloo, which can be made out on the left in the picture below. When I was passing, it about waist/chest height. I've not been back to see if they finished it!

I love snow! We don't get much of it in Southampton but today we are forecast to have rather a lot. I feel a little bit sorry for travelling students with exams today but I am looking forward to a snowy walk into work across the Common!

This morning, we popped into Southampton and decided to go in early to miss the main sales rush. That meant breakfast in town. We decided to check out the new Cafe Rouge Express in West Quay and discovered that the whole food court has been given a facelift. It looks really nice now and with a new Wagamama and Pizza Express in addition to the Cafe Rouge, a welcome addition to Southampton's lunch options. (I do love Wagamama!) There's an "Ed's Diner" coming soon too, which might sort out the Southampton brunch conundrum.

It's always nice to bask in the reflected glory of a collaborator. EU grants are hard to get and funding is getting ever tighter due to the global economic situation, so it was great to read of a local success as reported this week in a University of Soutampton press release. The congratulations go to Joerg Wiedenmann, who heads up The Coral Reef Laboratory here in Southampton.

Joerg does lots of interesting work on corals, looking at how they adapt to (or suffer at the hands of) Climate Change, including work on coral bleaching. I've done a little work with him on coral red fluorescent proteins, which are related to the famous Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). (The massive diversity of fluorescent protein mutants that now exist are a great example of how single amino acid mutations can have quite dramatic phenotypic effects that would certainly be "visible" to Natural Selection.) It's not published yet, though, and it's very much his project, so I won't write about it now.

Corals have also been in the Science news a lot recently following the recent discovery that they recruit gobies to act as "body guards" and clean off toxic seaweed that would otherwise threaten the coral's survival. Pretty cool!

Corals are generally fascinating animals even when they're not recruiting fish body guards. For one thing, they have symbiotic algae, which photosynthesise and can make up a substantial proportion of the material in each polyp. Indeed, it is expelling these algae under stress conditions that leads to the bleaching that Joerg studies. As an evolutionary biologist studying molecular responses to stress, however, this symbiosis can be frustrating as well as fascinating: corals could acclimate through their own regulatory changes or adapt through evolutionary changes, or these changes could happen in the algae, or by swapping algae. Enough options to keep researchers busy for some time!

The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) have their Southern Conference 2012 this Saturday, Dec 1st. It's on Highfield Campus at The University of Southampton, hosted by the Student's Union Atheist Society. One of the speakers is The Tippling Philosopher, whose blog I frequent when time allows (and who also reposted one of my posts on ID Creationism). Nice to see that they're heading to The Crown - my favourite pub near the Uni - afterwards for a pint or two and dinner. (Mmmm... Crown Burger!)

Although I am a member of The Rationalist Association, I've never actually attended an atheist or Humanist event since moving to Southampton, so I will try and get along if I can. If you're in the area, why not check it out?

It's a bit of a busy time of year, so blogging is on the back burner for a bit (and I'm accumulating half-written posts for later!) but this was just so weird and fun that I had to write a quick post. If you haven't heard of a raspberry pi computer before, you can find out all about them here. Basically, they are a very small, very cheap ($25) "credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard".



According to the FAQ:

It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Well, Prof Simon Cox (and colleagues) of the University of Southampton decided to go one better and used a bunch of them to teach his kid how to build a supercomputer! You can read about it on the Computational Modelling Group website.



What can it do? Well, according to Prof Cox:

“The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

I suspect it can do a bit more than that: the 64 processor system has 1Tb of memory! Not bad for £2500 (plus switches and, possibly, lego).

I felt the need to get out the office for lunch today and combat the resumption of bad weather, so I popped to one of the local Chinese restaurants (Chan's) for Singapore rice noodles. And very tasty they were too. I was slightly amused by my fortune cookie, though, working as I do at a University (where knowledge is held in somewhat high esteem):

If only this were true, all of our students that are surfing Facebook when they should be revising (or even listening to lectures!) would have much better marks! I am sure that who you know is important at times to get ahead in life but when it comes to trying to build - or contribute to - an accurate model of the world around you, I'm afraid that it's still what you know that counts.

(Sadly, one of the things the author of this "fortune" did not know, apparently, is how to use apostrophes. If only (s)he had known a copy editor...)

Today, we had a charity cake sale at work. Mmmmm! Chocolate cupcakes with a peanut butter frosting are highly recommended! Being a bunch of science geeks, there were even some baked DNA gels and C. elegans worms!

It was all in aid of Cancer Research UK and if you want to support the idea of cookie nematodes from afar, you can sponsor the "Girls of B85" for the upcoming 5k Race for Life Southampton.
I am happy to report that the C. elegans were very tasty!

Last weekend was the Southampton Kite Festival and the Flying Fish Kite team were performing their first public routine. I'm always a bit nervous when I go to see friends perform because, well, I'm not very good at lying and so I worry about how I will respond if they turn out to not be very good and I'm asked for my opinion. On top of that, I know that the weather of late has been pretty atrocious and so they probably have not had the chance to practice as much as they would have liked. On top of that the conditions on Sunday were a bit windy (although better than Saturday) and one of the pairs performing earlier in the day (the pairs team ranked 10th in the world, no less) had to restart their routine after one of their lines snapped in the wind!

Happily, all such worries were totally unnecessary and the Flying Fish were really good. For a pair that have only been formation flying for about a year, they were amazingly well synchronised and, given that this was their first public performance (including having friends watching), they showed no nerves at all. The routine was well structured and fun to watch.

There was a slight hiccup at one point when the kites got a little too close and experienced a tangle but, to be honest, I was really glad it happened because it meant that they started their routine again and we got to watch the first half of it for a second time. And they nailed it.

The Flying Fish also returned to field a bit later in the day as part of their other team, the L-Katz. This time, it was a four kite display. The first time I saw a four kite display, I think my jaw may have literally dropped. It's not just what the kites are doing, although that is impressive enough: it's a bit like watching the red arrows and as the kites swoop after and around each, performing fly-bys etc., you sometimes almost forget that there are people on the ground controlling them. The red arrows, though, are not attached to ground with strings. As well as the aerial ballet, making sure that the kites themselves do what they are supposed to in the air, there is a second ballet going on down below, with the flyers moving forwards, back and around each other to make sure that the kites do not get entangled in the wrong way. (The lines are so silky that they can actually control the kites well even when the lines have crossed each other a few times but it can still limit the range of motion and enforce some maneuvers that "unwrap" the kites.)

Anyway, just as with the Flying Fish pairs effort, the L-Katz turned out a great routine, especially when you consider it was their first public performance as a team too. Well done, guys (and gal)! You can read their take on the event here - if nothing else, it's worth a visit for a video of some crazy 11 kite action near the end of the day. (We missed that, unfortunately.) I also have a few more pictures at my Picasa Album of the event.

The rest of the Kite Festival was also a success, I think. It was raising money for the Air Ambulance and we got a little visit from their helicopter during the Flying Fish routine. There was the usual array of funky (and sometimes disturbing) kites and some great demonstration flying. The stunt kite demo was particularly impressive this year. We also got to see the British national champion team at work, which was extremely impressive: the precision and synchronisation of these guys is unbelievable.

Last, but not least, I have to mention Biggles Do'nut van. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid: it's hard to beat freshly cooked donuts, still warm and coated in cinnamon sugar. Mmmm.

...or two. In formation!

I've already posted on flying squid and flying squirrel( suit)s, now it's the turn of Flying Fish! This picture is my ArtStudio homage to The Flying Fish Kiting Team, who joined the Blogosphere this week. Unlike their biological namesakes, however, these guys really do fly. The kites do, at least. (Unless things go a bit wrong in high wind, the humans stay firmly on the ground.)

I've dabbled a little in flying kites - and no doubt will again when the sun decides to grace our fair isle with its presence again - but I'm at the level where I consider it a success if I don't crash. Getting one kite to do roughly what you want is not too hard if the conditions are right. Getting it to do exactly what you want is something more of a challenge. Doing it to music, synchronised and in formation with a partner... that's not easy. It looks really good, though: there's something very relaxing about watching a pair of kites swooping around after - and sometimes at - each other.

The Flying Fish are currently practicing for their first public routine at the 16th Southampton Kite Festival next week, so if you're in the area, come along and give them some support. The festival is always fun (if the weather behaves) and features some crazy kites - as well as rather fine donut van. This year, it's raising funds for the Air Ambulance Service, do that's another good reason to go if you can.