Posts

March 20, 2013

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8:51 AM | Valuing Science in New Zealand

On April 3rd, the New Zealand Association of Scientists is holding its annual conference to ask “What is the value of science in NZ?” (you can register here). As the conference chair, Dr Nicola Gaston, puts it: When scientists are asked to describe scientific research that isn’t done for short-term economic benefit, they call it [...]

March 10, 2013

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3:51 AM | An unfortunate experiment in peer review

A few months ago, Sir Peter Gluckman made the observation in a discussion paper (“Which science to fund: is it time to review peer review?”) that While scientists pride themselves on objectivity, there is surprisingly little in the way of objective assessment of the nature and quality of peer review processes for grant allocation. Ironically, [...]

October 24, 2012

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11:32 PM | Marsden 2012: Success rate continues to fall

This year’s Marsden Fund results were announced this morning. The full list of successful proposals is available on the Royal Society of New Zealand website, or, if you prefer, you can get a sampling of what the media made of the lucky winners via the Dom Post and the Herald. This year the success rate [...]

May 31, 2012

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2:55 PM | Pounamu

Next week on June 7-8, we will be running an on-line game called Pounamu using the Institute for the Future’s foresight engine. The engine brings a large community of people to come together to investigate, explore and discuss a future scenario. Pounamu invokes a future New Zealand that is trying to make its way in [...]

May 27, 2012

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1:43 AM | 40% of our post-doctoral fellowships gone? Who’s to blame?

“Are we failing our scientists?” asks Nikki MacDonald in last Saturday’s Dominion Post. MacDonald posed this question after obtaining figures from the Ministry of Science and Innovation showing that the number of post-doctoral positions funded by the Ministry fell from 386 in 2007/8 to 323 in 2009/10. And this decline occurred before the government had [...]

April 01, 2012

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10:34 PM | Sir Paul Callaghan (1947-2012)

Sir Paul Callaghan was arguably the greatest scientist ever to ply his trade in New Zealand. He led the world in his chosen field of science. He led a team of almost three hundred scientists who changed the way New Zealanders do science. He led the thinking behind the science and innovation policies that are [...]

October 09, 2011

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6:28 PM | Marsden 2011: Toughest year ever?

The successful Marsden Fund applicants were announced on Thursday after what might have been the toughest round ever. Although the total number of proposals received in the first round this year was slightly down, the overall success rate plummeted to just over 8%, the lowest in the data series I have*. The overall success rate [...]

August 18, 2011

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11:49 PM | Women in Science

The recent 2011 snapshot of women in science in New Zealand (you can get it here from the The New Zealand Association of Women in the Sciences) makes for sobering reading. Peter Griffin has reproduced some of the stats in his blog. In a nutshell, the report shows that there is a large gap in pay [...]

July 21, 2011

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7:11 PM | New Zealand’s voyage of economic self-discovery

How do we generate improved economic growth for New Zealand? Sir Paul Callaghan argues that we must shift from low productivity industries, like wine and tourism, to new high productivity industries, such as advanced manufacturing. If we were to do this, we would no doubt lift our economic performance. So why don’t we just get on [...]

July 05, 2011

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7:49 PM | Markets and the scientific method

I went undercover last week at the New Zealand Association of Economists conference to see what they had to say about innovation. Not so incognito was the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, Financial Times columnist and author of several highly entertaining popular economics books, who delivered the opening keynote address at the conference. In this post [...]

June 26, 2011

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7:21 PM | Professor Hendy retires

No, it’s not me … it’s my Dad, Mike Hendy, who retires this week from a Distinguished Professorship at Massey University in Palmerston North. Not surprisingly, people often ask me whether I am related to Mike Hendy. Hendy is an unusual last name, which we get from our Cornish ancestors, and Mike is probably the best [...]

May 23, 2011

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7:46 PM | Lifting New Zealand’s productivity through R&D

It gave me a warm glow to see innovation put at the heart of Labour’s new policy offerings this week. As I said to the Herald last week, I held no optimism for R&D in the 2011 Budget: “Both our government R&D spending and our business R&D spending is pretty tragic, both in terms of our [...]

April 19, 2011

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7:41 PM | Sir Paul Callaghan on sustainable economic growth

Another great talk from Paul Callaghan, available on YouTube: Paul argues that New Zealanders have earned their prosperity by exploiting their environment. Not only does this bust the myth that we are clean and green, Paul points out that we are poorer for it: in fact, this strategy has seen our GDP plummet to the bottom [...]

April 14, 2011

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5:20 AM | The New Zealand Innovation Ecosystem Map

Ten days ago we released a map of New Zealand’s largest inventor network using Google Earth to geo-locate the inventors in New Zealand. The map revealed some interesting connections between companies and public sector research organisations that at first site may have seemed unrelated. It also showed that Kiwi inventors are collaborating across the country, [...]

April 03, 2011

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7:55 PM | New Zealand’s largest inventor network: A glimpse of our innovation ecosystem

We have been experimenting with ways to represent the inventor networks that we can extract from patent databases. In this post, I will focus on New Zealand’s largest inventor network, as extracted from 30 years of European Patent Office (EPO) data. The network gives us a glimpse of New Zealand’s innovation ecosystem. At the left is [...]

March 16, 2011

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2:25 AM | How to shut down a nuclear reactor

As Japan deals with the after-effects of its strongest earthquake on record and an even more devastating tsunami, the world’s attention is focussed on the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The plant houses a number of nuclear reactors, which, despite being shut down during the earthquake, need to be carefully managed to ensure that the nuclear [...]

November 08, 2010

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9:40 AM | The world’s biggest inventor network

I have been on the road recently giving my talk on evidence for agglomeration and networks in the international patent record. Over consecutive weeks I gave talks at the the New Zealand Association of Scientists meeting in Wellington, NZ eResearch Symposium at the University of Auckland and then at Running Hot at Te Papa. Phew. It [...]

October 20, 2010

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7:33 AM | Critical mass or is mass critical?

In research and development, it’s often taken for granted that teams require a certain critical mass to be successful. Indeed, in a recent paper [1] two European researchers claim to have seen the effects of critical mass in the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its French equivalent (HT: Mark Wilson). However, I think that [...]

October 06, 2010

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8:10 AM | Quantum computing

On Thursday evening, I will be talking about quantum computing on Bryan Crump’s radio show (Nights, Radio New Zealand National, 8.42pm, 7 October). Bryan and I have had several conversations on the workings of contemporary computing technologies, from quantum mechanics to transistors, and then on to how transistors are assembled into integrated circuits. This week, [...]

October 01, 2010

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2:33 AM | Marsden 2010: Levels of funding and success rates fall

The 2010 Marsden fund results were announced by the Royal Society last week. The Marsden fund supports much of New Zealand’s blue skies research and is one of the most prestigious grants available to New Zealand scientists. In total this year, 102 proposals were awarded just under $60m to be spent over the next three [...]

September 14, 2010

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7:33 PM | How do we reverse New Zealand’s decline in global competitiveness?

The World Economic Forum has just released its latest global competitiveness rankings for 2010-11. New Zealand has fallen from 20th to 23rd place, and is now seven places behind Australia. What puts us behind our competitors, and why are we slipping? First, not all the news is bad. We are ranked particularly well for the quality [...]

August 25, 2010

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11:53 PM | The southern lights

Tonight I will be talking about the aurora on Bryan Crump’s radio show (Nights, Radio New Zealand National, 8.42pm, Thursday August 26th). I won’t spend much time here explaining the underlying physics of the effect, but take a look at the beautiful infographic posted by Peter Griffin. Now although I didn’t see any sign of the [...]

August 17, 2010

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7:42 PM | Picking Winners?

It seems to have become received wisdom recently that New Zealand must pick winners with its public science investment. In this post, I argue that this is not new: we picked our winners a long time ago, with a strong focus on agricultural and environmental sciences. So what are the pros and cons of backing [...]

August 01, 2010

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10:03 PM | What science are Australians doing?

By popular request our intern has put together a subject area tag cloud for Australia from their 2009 publications in the ISI database. As she observed, Australia is poorly designed. So much so that it is hard to squeeze Canberra’s tag cloud in between those of Sydney and Melbourne. In fact, you’ll see in the [...]

July 29, 2010

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6:58 PM | Who are we collaborating with?

Our talented intern from MIT has produced another tag cloud. This time she has taken a look at who we collaborated with in 2008 based on our co-publication preferences in the ISI database. The resulting map is shown below: It’s clear we like working with Australians. Those in Auckland, Palmerston North and Christchurch prefer to [...]

July 25, 2010

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6:56 PM | What science are we doing?

What science are New Zealanders working on? To help me answer this question, I have an intern from MIT here for her summer break. Luckily for me, she hadn’t heard about Wellington’s winter. (Not that our spring or summer are up to much either, although we can put on a decent autumn.) She is a very [...]