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Text of the page (random words):
need to go to the science faculty office to get the relevant form across campus at the science faculty office after some confusion i get given a form which seems more like a student degree application form than anything else and get told that at some point i will need to pay a fee to unblock my registration back at the geology department after checking that i m not literally on a wild goose chase i fill in the sections of the form which actually seem relevant back to biographics who tell me that the form needs to be stamped by the international office upstairs at the international office they stamp my form but tell me that my account must be unblocked my paying the fee at the finance office i venture the other way across campus to the finance office where i queue for 20 minutes or so to pay the fee back in once more to biographics and finally get my student number return in triumph to the international office they give me yet another form to take back to finance i m starting to think that my first visit and payment was unnecessary but no one seems sure after shuttling between a couple of people in the finance office they tell me i am now ok to register at the science faculty office i return to the science faculty office where they discover my account is still blocked after 10 minutes of phoning around what a novel concept i finally get registered i was an undergraduate at a university that has had eight centuries to perfect its administrative opacity but i have to admit i m thoroughly impressed at least i can say that i got some exercise this morning and got a lot of practice in finding my way around the campus posted by chris r at 2 53 pm 1 comments labels academic life 26 february 2007 if at first you don t get published in nature cheat just a quick plug whilst i settle in down here in jo burg actually i ve never even tried to get properly published in nature i ve yet to stray into fields of study that are sexy enough nonetheless thanks to the mysteriously vanished postblogger s heads up i m getting the chance to sneak a few words of wisdom into print as one of this years four postdoc journal keepers 200 250 words a month might not seem like very much wisdom but i know some very long words my first entry was published the thursday before last quite why i was deemed worthy is uncertain i suspect that my exotic post doc destination probably helped matters but i suspect that all the writing practice i ve had on these pages in recent months probably helped too posted by chris r at 9 00 am 5 comments labels academic life bloggery 22 february 2007 in transit the last week or so has been intense the speed at which moving to another country went from a theoretical possibility to imminent reality caught me completely unawares and i suddenly had a million things to do and too little time to do them in somehow i got most things organised i suspect more due to luck than judgement and now with a few hitches i m on my way what s weird is that not only do i not know what to expect when i arrive in johannesburg but i ve been so focussed on the departure date that i haven t even thought about it until now a 12 hour flight lies between me and finding out posted by chris r at 7 33 pm 2 comments labels academic life 15 february 2007 valentine s day massacre other people may have received cards telling them how wonderful they were yesterday but not me instead i got a nice long e mail from jgr regarding two papers i submitted way back in june which i have alluded to previously which was about as far from roses are red territory as you could get i haven t really talked about the research behind these papers on this blog i guess i didn t want to pre empt publication somewhat ironically but they were basically presenting the major conclusions of my phd project a study of the tectonic evolution of new zealand in the last 20 million years using paleomagnetic measurements to look at crustal rotations my first paper presented my dataset which took a lot of work to amass and the second was my attempt to construct a model of deformation to explain these data i m still chewing over the reviews they ve hardly arrived at a convenient time but the basic gist seems to be that they don t like my data although they couldn t really find much wrong with it and they really don t like my model they were very keen to point out to me that accommodating the large and fast crustal rotations my data seem to indicate much larger and faster than has previously been suggested is not easy and my suggestions for how it has happened are a little bit at odds with the well established picture never anyway there s a lot to filter and think about which obviously i don t have time to do at the moment so for now i m just going to have to go aaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh instead posted by chris r at 11 24 pm 3 comments labels academic life ranting 13 february 2007 how to waste even more time with google earth i dare you to visit this rather funky map quiz and not get addicted my only complaint is that the pictures containing nothing but ocean floor are a little bit too difficult thanks to ron posted by chris r at 6 05 pm 2 comments labels geology links 12 february 2007 wasting your life creationist style i suppose as a geologist i should feel angry and aggrieved about this newly minted phd student dr ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist he is a young earth creationist he believes that the bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe and that the earth is at most 10 000 years old for him dr ross said the methods and theories of paleontology are one paradigm for studying the past and scripture is another in the paleontological paradigm he said the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate the fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means he said that i am separating the different paradigms later in the article is becomes fairly clear that his motivation for getting his doctorate is to use the fact that he has a ph d from a legitimate science department as a springboard for pushing a literalist viewpoint i can t bring myself to be angry about this though even though i can understand why others might instead i find it sad a waste of half a decade or more of someone s life getting through a phd is no picnic at the best of times in my experience it s only your fundamental enthusiasm and interest in your subject that gets you through forcing yourself through the whole traumatic process when you believe deep down that every word you write every measurement you make and every conclusion you draw is fundamentally mistaken well let s just say that i can t see it doing wonders for your mental well being over at pz s where this story came to my attention see also chad s take a large proportion of the comments are debating whether the university of rhode island would be justified in withdrawing his doctorate or even given that they knew about his young earth beliefs before he applied whether he should have been admitted to the phd programme in the first place i d have to unequivocally answer no and yes respectively in the context of a phd you can only be judged on what you have submitted and his supervisor tells us all we need to know his subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs marine reptiles that as he wrote vanished at the end of the cretaceous era about 65 million years ago the work is impeccable said david e fastovsky a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was dr ross s dissertation adviser he was working within a strictly scientific framework a conventional scientific framework we are not here to certify his religious beliefs he said all i can tell you is he came here and did science that was completely defensible presuming that this is an accurate representation of his dissertation it s a no brainer he came he followed the rules and he advanced his field so he earned his doctorate however galling it may be that he has proceeded to use his qualification in the manner that he has to add a veneer of scientific authority to flawed creationist arguments besides there s something else interesting about this story the fact that when push came to shove to get his qualification he had to follow the ground rules of science and when he did that what happened to all those big obvious gaping holes in the scientific picture of an old earth and common descent that we hear so much about did he try even slightly to cast some light on those holes with his research it doesn t look like it to me rather than a bold assault on the evil darwinian empire we get some meandering about working within a particular paradigm of earth history likewise despite his self declared mission to destroy darwinism it seems that johnathan wells kept his powder dry during his time at berkeley in both cases the choice to use the phd qualification as a rhetorical weapon rather than the phd research pretty much tells you all you need to know posted by chris r at 11 32 pm 8 comments labels antiscience geology 10 february 2007 contestants raise your hammers from the berkeley geological association blog with some snipping geolympics is the ultimate in field geologist competition this yearly event should put to the test all the field practices geologist s are trained to perform with accuracy and time contraints as parameters of success 1 the brunton imagine 5 or so rocks with varying strikes dips slickenlines etc that need measuring whilst being timed 2 rock demolition imagine a line of geologists armed with a basketball size chunk of granite and their favorite rock hammer they are timed to see who can smash their rocks into chunks no bigger than a baseball 3 twisted map folding imagine a new crisp map completly unfolded and a geologist blind folded who must then by feel alone fold the map into its original orientation while being timed 4 gear up gear down imagine a geologist pulling up his her truck when the clock starts and they must exit the vehicle and gear up with boots hand lens brunton hammer with loop acid bottle map rain gear the works then when complete screaming rock it and then undressing again into street clothes packing away the gear and firing up the truck again a few more potential events occur to me contact free running a test of mapping skill and athleticism contestants have to precisely follow a contact between two formations across hill dale ravine cliff face river bracken and bog points for speed accuracy and style drilling time trial one for the paleomagicians amongst us contestants are given an hour to drill orient and extract as many core samples as they can scoring is based on the length of the cores as well as the number i e an 8cm core which yields 3 standard paleomagnetic samples scores the same as three cores which yield only one each solo and pair events geo orienteering like orienteering except you have a geological map and specified rock samples must be gathered from each control point i m sure you guys can come up with some more events posted by chris r at 5 42 pm 0 comments labels geology humour 09 february 2007 reality intrudes on blogging you might have noticed that things fell silent here only two days into my promised seven day epic as it has turned out the reasons i prevaricated about signing up to the just science challenge in the first place have defeated me exam marking to get through a couple of presentations to give and due to the fact that next week is my last week here in southampton lots of departmental loose ends to tie up as if that weren t enough just when i d figured that the south african consulate were going to tell me to get lost on wednesday my passport came back with a nice visa stuck in it it s really happening in two weeks i shall be arriving in south africa to start my new job which means that i have quite a lot to get done between now and then anyway although i had a number of half completed posts lying around and i believed that i would have enough time to polish and post one up every day i have ended up being too busy or too tired to really give them they attention they deserve and if i m honest my motivation was also sapped by the realisation that for some reason my posts were appearing in the just science aggregator dated as 1969 or something and were not appearing in the rss feed either however whilst i have failed miserably at least one geoblogger is making a good fist of it brian is going from strength to strength with a great series of posts on sedimentary geology i particularly liked wednesday s post about the modelling of depositional systems in big tanks posted by chris r at 4 26 pm 5 comments labels academic life bloggery just science 06 february 2007 stalagmite records individual storms and intensities in last months post about climate records from stalagmites and other speleothems i concentrated on their potential for giving us detailed regional climate information over long time periods 10s and even 100s of thousands of years however this article at mongabay com highlights some research concerned with records preserving climatic variations over much shorter timescales and one of the more contentious issues in modern climate research how the frequency and intensity of hurricanes is affected by our warming climate it seems that the towering storm clouds and humid atmosphere associated with hurricanes and other tropical cyclones produce rainwater which is extremely light isotopically it has delta 18 o 6 per mil more negative than normal precipitation and a lot of it falls in a short time when a storm hits land amy frappier and her colleagues decided to test if this pulse of storm water could affect the delta 18 o of the groundwater enough to leave a signal in speleothems growing in underlying caves we used a computer controlled dental drill to carefully mill off layers of powder from a fast growing stalagmite from actun tunichil muknal caves belize where each sample reflects cave drip water over periods of a week to a month analyzing these rock powders using standard techniques we were able to detect brief spikes from recent hurricanes and tropical storms that produced rain over the cave even when those storms struck only weeks apart the effect is clearly illustrated by this figure from a paper frappier et al have just published in geology 1 tropical cyclones which have hit belize in the last 30 years a correlate well with short negative excursions in delta 18 o b these excursions are superimposed on a longer term pattern related to the el nino southern oscillation the 15 month offset with the el nino record in c represents the time it takes rainwater to percolate from the surface to the cave the accompanying carbon isotope record also shows the el nino variation probably due to changes in soil respiration rates but not the storm events showing that they are due to a separate forcing heavy storm precipation the final subfigure d is interest...