An Exercise in Irrelevance

Fours days of ontology bashing at an OBI meeting; this leaves me extremely glad to be going home. The meeting was long, hard and tiring. We got a lot done in the time available, though, and that was impressive. All the people in the room knew what they were doing, and we managed to work together and in parallel to an impressive extent. Even while listening to the main conversation, most people we also skype chatting about something else to those in and outside the room.

I spend a considerable time working on the paper, which will accompany the release. I got this job, mostly as to regularise and clean up the English, but in the end did rather more than this; I hope people are not upset about the stuff that I took out; the whole thing was done “pair programming style”, although I had different pairs for different sections.

Despite all the efforts, though, there are still tracker items open for the 1.0 release, and thats not ideal, but it is good that we are much closer to it.

Philly was much as I remember it; it’s a reasonably pleasant city. It doesn’t feel too aggressive and it’s relatively quiet. As I had a late flight out today (meeting finished yesterday), I spent the time wandering around town; like too many US cities Philly has been built to be easy to drive through, rather than good to live in, but you Philly is okay for walking around. They have a nice parkway area on JFK boulevard; I had a nice guided tour around the Rodin museum, which was wonderful, even if lacking The Thinker which is normally their show piece entranceway sculpture. Rodin was big on hands, it turns out, and rather fond of the musculature of backs; the captions on the bronzes suggest that he was having affairs with many of his models, so I wonder if this stems from…well, you can work it out.

After that, I wandered up to the art museum past the twee statue of Rocky Balboa, and the converse footprints sculpted in the stairs. The art museum itself is huge; the Thinker is temporarily here, so I got to see it after all, but I think it needs to be outside. As well as the traditional galleries, and strangely, they also have a lot of furniture there, and have imported whole rooms from various places. For me, the Asian section was the best; they had an Indian temple, dark and brooding in the half-light, and a Chinese room with the most amazing timbers. I felt the indoor Romanesque outside courtyard (erm…) was taking it a bit too far.

Not much left to be done after an afternoon full of culture; on the way back to the hotel, I looked for a little park on Chestnut that I had wanted to see and a falafel shop which I had seen sign posted. I found neither; the park had left no traces at all, the falafel shop I found a poster for, but I walked all the street and as far as I can tell 1740 Sansome is a multistory parking lot.

Back where I started, sitting in the airport; tick, tock, tick, tock.

Bleary eyed, stacks of chocolate muffins obscuring the “healthy snacking” sign, kids on heelers. Yes, I’m in the airport at stupid-o-clock on saturday morning. I’m heading out to Philadelphia for an OBI meeting. It’s an important meeting; OBI has been a long time in gestation, but this should constitute the 1.0 release; it’s going to be a mass tidy up session.

I’m quite looking forward to it, in some ways. I quite like Philadelphia, at least if my memory serves me well; I’ve only been there once, for the SOFG conference many, many moons ago, certainly in my pre-blog days. I remember it as a pleasant town, with a water-front, only slightly scarred by the enormous roads that make US cities less livable than European. I’m also hoping to catch up with Robin McEntire, who was one of the co-chairs of Bio-Ontologies at ISMB, and is local.

I’m rather unprepared for the meeting. There has been a lot of activity on the mailing list recently, some of it concerned with paper preparation. But I’ve been trying to get the rest of my teaching preparation finished (nearly done now) which has left me very busy over the last few weeks; I haven’t even had time to look at the paper; I’ve hardly read even the mailing list subject lines. Still, the next week is entirely given over to OBI, which will have to be enough. Travel at this time of year messes with my life to an extent that I’m certainly not going to feel guilty about it.

The flip side of being busy, is that I am now in the process of writing about 5 papers, with the next 2 in my head. After the confusion of moving to Newcastle, working out what research to do and learning to teach, my research was getting a bit stuck; I was running out of ideas for the simple reason of not having time to think. Having an enormous backlog of nearly finished, half-finished, and hardly started good ideas (most of which will, in time, turn out not to be) for papers makes me feel like a proper academic again.

I was most entertained to read about EPSRCs funding policy changes. Basically, they have taken a long hard look at their system for funding, they have decided that the peer-review system has fundamental problems, and have therefore issued their well thought out and considered solution to the problem: blame the users.

Their idea is this; if you are on too many grants that fail, then you won’t be allowed to submit again until you have been on some sort of re-education camp. The basic criteria appear to be this: three or more unfunded proposals, ranked in the bottom half, and lower than 25% success over the same two years.

The first criteria is problematic because it is based on an aggregate score; it is impossible to judge in advance whether you are going to be in bottom half; your proposal could be brilliant and internationally outstanding (EPSRC is like Lake Wobegon, all the grants are above average) and you could still be in the bottom half. The second half of the criterion is also interesting; if you submit a single proposal and it gets rejected then you are fall into this category straight away. It’s also going to mean that it’s going to be harder to get people to do collaborative grants, as it might bring their stats down. This is after EPSRC have been pushing us for years to put at least 5 different institutions on each proposal if we want it to be funded.

At the same time, information about the REF which is to follow up from the wonderous RAE is starting to trickle out. Nice to see that they are still going to reinforce the existing closed publication system with more bibliometric data. The “You are the REF” website offers itself as a way to work out your score. Excitingly the first question is “What is your discipline?”; Computer Scientist or Biologist. This seems reflective of the REF documentation that I have seen already. It works on this basis: different disciplines have different rules, so we will make different decisions in each, which is fine, because no one can be in two anyway.

Glad to see that the REF is carrying on the RAE tradition of encouraging multi-disciplinary research.

Last night was my first time at the Cluny 2, which used to be the Round, as some of the signs inside still claim. It’s not round any more, having a conventional stage. There is still noise from the Cluny 1 upstairs and the occasional flushing of toilets; I guess that they can’t complain about this anymore.

The support was Naomi Sommers. Pretty standard format, really, one woman and a guitar. She has a lovely voice, rich and warm which made the show. Some of her songs are pretty strong (“February”); some were less good, but no bad ones. Enjoyable.

Eric Taylor, I’ve not seen before. He also has a great voice, supported by some excellent finger-picking. His stage presence is dark and melodramatic. He’s also a bit nuts; songs were separated by repetitious and rambling talks about, well, something. Most of it didn’t really make sense. Combined with the increasingly cold Cluny 2, it was all a bit much, so I skipped the encore. Entertaining, in parts, but not entirely satisfying.

There is a mystery behind Brains SA; what exactly does it stand for? Among those who know, it is universally revered as skull attack. I’ve reasonably fond of it, but tonight, perhaps, I finally understood how it came by it’s moniker.

After getting home, following several pints, I was suddenly struck by a desire to listen to Jimmy Sommerville; there is, of course, no sanity or logic to this at all, but there you have it. Now, of course, his pop sensibilities are well known, but I remember, like a folk memory hidden deep in my brain, “For a friend” released shortly, perversely after “Never Can Say Goodbye”. No dancy pop tune this, but an elegiac ballad to a friend lost to the virus of the 80s. I think I only heard it twice before it disappeared; but I remember it was wonderful.

A quick search of spotify led me to his latest collection, digital only, called “Suddenly Last Summer”. The most bizarre, wonderful collection of songs, covers, with an odd twist. “Hanging on the telephone” as folk ballad; “Hush” with a mandolin solo.

I have my own ideas and opinions about the future of music. And as a sometime, occasional performer myself, I do care about musicians. I want them to be earning a living. I don’t know if Lily Allen is right, or whether the internet will be the death of middleman, to the benefit of us all. But, for myself as a consumer, the ability to gain instant gratification, to listen to such strange, marvelous music that surely I would never have remembered to buy, even if it had been available in a store has to be great thing. I don’t know for sure how musicians of the future will make money; but, I live in hope. Are there enough people like my, acting on a strange impulse, to make it worthwhile. But musicians have something to sell, something that people value; there must be a business model hidden in there somewhere.

The record companies and Pop Idol, well, that’s a different issue. Few people will mourn their passing.

SA, indeed.

Beginning of term, so I guess it’s not too much of a surprise that I haven’t blogged for ages. Life does get slightly swamped by work at this time of year; yesterday, I was so tired after working at full-tilt for two weeks that I even took most of the day off.

Anyway, I realised that I’ve been missing out on films that I have watched, so I thought to do a quick, condensed review here. All of them films that I’ve been looking forward to, but only 1 managed to fulfil its promise.

So, Spiderman III. I do enjoy superhero films; plenty of action, add a bit of pathos and some humour; then, you have a food film, especially good for a plane or otherwise. Spiderman I and II were, I thought, great examples. No III was one too far; basically, the plot was too winding, too random; it just felt like a day-in-the-life, a diary of a superhero. Pity. Don’t know why. Perhaps, they just ran out of ideas.

X-Men III is a different kettle of fish; a new director for the final part, and one who did not show the deftness for ensembles that Bryan Singer did. Despite throwing in more characters, despite a “bigger” story and despite behaving with more dramatic events (including killing of half the cast), it just failed. Also confused and random, I wasn’t always sure what was going on, and it didn’t feel like a logical development of the former. Same problem as spiderman essentially.

Son of Rambow. Probably cost 1/10 of the others (or less). Magnificent. Funny, engaging and heart-warming without a hint of tweeness. The characters were lovely, the acting adept and the script very, very funny. If you haven’t watched it, well, just do. And don’t stop for Spiderman or X-Men along the way.