I do not find this persuasive 

Barbara Ellen reports 

The Guardian:

How quaint that the Conservative party is planning to punish naughty children by taking away their mobiles. Labour is proving much more hardline: taking away the educational futures of tens of thousands of British teenagers, who will be denied university places this autumn.

This shortage of places, between 60,000 and 80,000, has been caused not only by cutbacks, and higher numbers of young applicants, but also by older applicants, "mature students", who have lost their jobs and want to "sit out the recession" at college. Well, fine, so long as the younger applicants get priority.

Admittedly, I am biased. I am one of Britain's beleaguered Pots (parents of teenagers) and this is a headache too far. Don't our young already have it tougher than recent generations? And, while I have nothing against mature students, surely they should be given places purely because they want to study. Otherwise, all we are doing is enabling the government to hide appalling unemployment figures.

It is almost reverse ageism - the young being bumped out of their rightful places so that universities can be employed as higher education catacombs for the fiscally dispossessed. Suspicion deepens when one hears of Brown's response to the crisis - the creation of a measly 10,000 places, with priority given to "maths, science and engineering".

Brilliant, except it would be surprising if there was a shortage of places in such technical subjects, though, if they had the relevant qualifications, these may be the sort of degrees mature, probably male, students would go for. What a coincidence.

I suspect there may be other reasons why the government may wish to give priority to "maths, science[,] and engineering" than to directly conspire to deprive Ellen's offspring of places reading sappier subjects. I'm not going to engage in fashionably smug sneering at "humanities graduates"[1], but stuff like this makes you wonder...

[1] Why is so much opprobrium directed at "media studies", BTW? Why is this subject derided in a way that related subjects like "political science", "history", and "english" aren't?

Dark Helmet

First up, Sir Terry Pratchett is a legend, and I've read all his books, including the ones nominally for children. The programme was both moving and watchable. He did an excellent piece for, IIRC, BBC Breakfast when he said that he wasn't sure it works, and discussed the importance of controlled testing. "It" is a therapeutic light helmet that, it is suggested, is beneficial for Alzheimer's sufferers. 

The bloke pushing the helmet came across as a bit creepy, to be honest. I'm going to remain skeptical about the idea for the moment: there's been one study in mice (here, thanks to science based medicine), and an unpublished, non-controlled human study which formed the basis for a press release.  Hmmmm.

As I'm not qualified to discuss the medical evidence, such as it is, I'll confine myself to the photonics [1]. I was a bit surprised by two aspects of the helmet: (i) the choice of wavelength and (ii) the sheer weight of thing.

(i) 1072nm (the wavelength from the mice study) is a bit of a funny wavelength to chose to generate with diodes.  You could could get a nice neodymium:YAG laser (suitably attenuated), diode pumped straight from the mains at 1064nm (and maybe externally tune to push the wavelength out to the edge of the gain spectrum), I suppose, but diode-wise the wavelengths 1050nm-1260nm are in a bit of a wasteland. Plenty of diodes in the red-NIR (the AlGaAs/GaAs  heterostructure laser was born to serve this range, and bulk GaAs has a band gap ~850nm at room temperature), you can hit the green-blue and even UV by making the jump from the zincblende to wurzite structure - with corresponding leap in bandgap - by putting some nitrogen into your device, and the telecoms wavelength region of 1.3micron (dispersion minimum of fibre) or 1.55micron (attenuation minimum of fibre) are well served (and correspondingly cheap), but the range in between? InAs/GaAs quantum wells, I suppose, might do it, or more exotically a quantum dot laser that either operates in an excited state or has been annealed to move the ground state to the appropriate energy; or perhaps an InP heterostructure? Could be pricey. I note the company already produces a hand held cold sore device that operates at this wavelength, so presumably they have access to a source of these diodes. The company sells it's device for £45 - I wonder how many diodes it contains? 

(ii) for goodness sake, the thing left impressions on his skull, and had a least one bloody great cooling fan. It would be much more sensible to build a fibre-based system: generate the light on a box on the floor, generate all the waste heat there where it can be air cooled away. This would make wearing the helmet more comfortable, and make controlling experiments easier (you wouldn't know if the devise were switched on or not), and would allow a range of wavelengths to be tested. This would be important to find out what is going on, and if a cheaper kind of light source could be used. I know fibre isn't brilliant away from 1.3 and 1.55micron, but it only needs to travel a few meters.

Bottom line: we need more information, some double-blinded controlled experiments that can survive peer review - and a better helmet design.

[1] If you are a UK taxpayer, perhaps I could take this opportunity to thank you for funding me to study this stuff. I'm very grateful. 

"Peer review is the worse system, apart from all the others" 

Tales of horror in the Academy

LemmusLemmus reports on a couple of excellent "editors are bastards and wouldn't know a qualified reviewer from a half-wit" anecdotes:

You know, I suspected that particular reviewer had obtained his deep historical knowledge of the Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages by watching "Fiddler on the Roof." That shows just how cynical I am. And then he confirmed it, when I asked him.

Everyone has one or two of these: share yours in the comments.

Mash-up madness!

In which we muse on the implications of new copyright policy of the American Physical Society

Whilst trying to check the maximum article length for Applied Physics Letters, I stumbled across this:

When you submit an article to an APS journal, we ask you to sign our copyright form. It transfers copyright for the article to APS, but keeps certain rights for you, the author. We have recently changed the form to add the right to make ‘‘derivative works’’ that reuse parts of the article in a new work. 

This is rather exciting[1]: the APS has always given you the right to reprint figures for use in books, and for all co-authors to host a .pdf of papers on personal websites, this means you'll be able to use individual figures directly. [Also, it'll save the bother of clearing figures individually with APS, should you be writing a review chapter]

The editorial goes on to state that this will permit authors to create Wikipedia articles, which seems a bit passé, although I suppose it might raise the quality/quantity of the wikipedia physics articles.

[1] For a given value of "exciting", obviously...