My impression was that Alan Gilbert's aspiration for University of Manchester was to be a global institution that had transcended the scruffy industrial city an accident of history had located it in.
But Nancy Rothwell's commitment to the city was real and reflected her own Lancashire roots.
and she was notably successful at cultivating George Osborne, & working with SHB to prise money from Whitehall both for the university and the city (much as those of us in other northern universities resented this at the time!)
It's a good piece, but I think a bit unfair on Duncan's predecessor, Nancy Rothwell, just to dismiss her as "unpopular" and "arrogant & imperious". I think she was instrumental in transforming the university's relationship with the city, e.g. through her close relationship with Howard Bernstein,
"Lessons from the gas price spike". Written in 2022, but (unfortunately) worth revisiting.
softmachines.org?p=2675
It's nostalgia, & failure to acknowledge that UK economic success 80's onwards was powered by North Sea oil & gas; production peaked around 2000 & fell abruptly afterwards as the easiest & most economical fields to exploit were depleted.
The UK had a 25 year holiday from energy geopolitics, now over
It also means that resources are moved from one place to another. Good news if you have a missile factory in your town (e.g. Bolton).
A blogpost introducing 4 different problems of protein folding:
- protein structure prediction
- nature of protein folding transition
- role of proteins that don’t fold at all
- importance of protein misfolding, esp for diseases like Alzheimer’s
softmachines.org?p=3258
The problem of predicting protein structure from sequence has been definitively solved by the AI programme AlphaFold, winning a well-deserved Nobel prize for its developers.
But structure prediction is just one of at least four different problems of protein folding...
Biggest contribution of AI to science so far: AlphaFold, which has solved problem of predicting protein 3d structure from 1d sequence.
But there are other problems of protein folding: understanding mechanisms & pathways, misfolding, & role of disordered proteins: my blogpost
softmachines.org?p=3258
Another example of the importance of local context & environment on folding and misfolding pathways, I guess!
Thanks for the correction, I appreciate it.
I changed the caption to "derived from material taken from the brain of a patient with Alzheimer’s disease" - do you think this is more accurate? Thanks.
Yes, the "how" question is clearly important and yet unsolved.
The figure was from Molecule of the Month, it's quoted there to be from www.rcsb.org/structure/2M4J, which is claimed to be "human-brain derived". But looking at the paper I see they talk about "human brain seeded".
A blogpost introducing 4 different problems of protein folding:
- protein structure prediction
- nature of protein folding transition
- role of proteins that don’t fold at all
- importance of protein misfolding, esp for diseases like Alzheimer’s
softmachines.org?p=3258
The problem of predicting protein structure from sequence has been definitively solved by the AI programme AlphaFold, winning a well-deserved Nobel prize for its developers.
But structure prediction is just one of at least four different problems of protein folding...
I'm not sure - certainly the timing leading up to the peak seems right, but single molecule biophysics is still a thing so not sure why you'd see the drop off.
piconewtons are very convenient in single molecule biophysics because the work done moving 1 nm against a 1 pN force is about 0.25 times kT at room temperature. So typical forces measured if you're pulling a single macromolecule away from a surface are in the pN range.
I think it means that it's even less likely that UK net zero policies have anything to do with de-industrialisation of energy intensive industries, if it's just the raw price of gas that's making the difference. But I'm not totally sure, just I haven't seen this referred to much in the discourse.
An important distinction to be made between electricity & energy more generally. Most large scale energy using industries, esp chemicals, use gas directly for process heat, & have their own combined cycle gas turbines for combined heat and power. So it's specifically gas prices that are the problem
This is very very good on the underperformance of the UK graduate premium.
It's a demand side problem.*
*as people at SPRU have been saying for 40 years.
Also some v impressive individuals in GM local govt, both in political leadership & among officers. Andy Burnham rightly insists that he's building on what Richard Leese & Howard Bernstein achieved. Perhaps their biggest legacy was a commitment to economic growth as a precondition for social justice
The spirit of collaboration that Burnham talks about is real, IME. Not to say that there aren't scratchy moments, in real life there are always some conflicting priorities, but there's a will to resolve them constructively.
Good to see this coverage. When I first went to Manchester in 2020, I was really impressed by the closeness of relations between university and city leadership, and the shared commitment to economic growth. As UoM VP for Regional Innovation & Civic Engagement, I tried to build on that.
As Tom says, there's lots we can do to “haul [the UK's] productivity growth and skilled job creation back into line with its peers”. Up to now, we haven't really tried.
But I think it's a counsel of despair to say we should resign ourselves to having a stagnant economy that's increasingly falling behind the technological frontier, get used to falling living standards, and shrink the HE sector to fit a middle-income economy...
Great piece from @tomforth.co.uk on the shrinking graduate premium in the UK.
The UK's skills problem is not a problem of supply, it's one of demand; our regional economies are not complex & successful enough to absorb the number of graduates we produce.
tomforth.co.uk/graduateprem...
One unhelpful aspect of current discourse around universities is tendency to set HE & vocational courses in opposition.
Reality is more than half of students in UK universities are doing these directly vocational subjects:
-Business studies
-subjects allied to medicine
-computing
-engineering
-law
In this case, as you mentioned above, there's a pretty clear connection between mathematical methods of finance & classical areas of physics. E.g. the Scholes-Black equation for pricing options is essentially a diffusion equation. Some reflections on this from the archive
softmachines.org?p=444
I've never quite known what to think of the fact that one of my fellow physics students, year above me in college, founded a hedge fund & is now a billionaire (& a generous donor to the dept/uni).
But yes, many physics grads go into financial services in one form or another.
But I think discussion would be healthier if commentators realised that a student doing midwifery, or accountancy and finance, was much closer to the median than the "woke studies" students of their imagination.
None of which is to say that I think other university disciplines don't teach important & marketable skills (including my own, physics, of course), or that there aren't issues to be addressed in the HE sector.
