Finally got back from All Hands. Could have done without the meeting really, as it's left me very tight for the beginning of term and a BBSRC grant deadline. Was a good meeting though. There was an interesting talk on a ontology of units of measurement — perhaps not exciting but everyone needs it. Peter Buneman gave a talk on why annotation is hard. His conclusion — that you need a reliable identifier system — seems fair, although problematic; reliable identifers have been discussed before, but they require coordination and probably centralisation. While I don't hold entirely with the "404 is a feature not a bug" argument, it is true that requiring this form of centralisation brings with it many disadvantages.

Ah, term start; bang goes any chance of sciece happening for the next few weeks.

At All Hands Meeting in Nottingham. It's changed over the years from a very poor conference when no one had anyhthing to talk about to something more reasonable. Already had a couple of interesting discussions, one of which might help with getting a statistical ontology together for CARMEN.

The talks have been okay, although of widely different quality from the interesting to the inconsequential. One of the big changes this year is that people are spending much more time talking about their science rather than the technology which was used to achieve this. A very good thing, to my mind. It's important that this work be kepts grounded and if projects can't get someone to talk about the science then I think that there are problems. Also, you get to hear about some new areas science (crystallography at the moment) which has to be up from 15 talks in a row on "what I did with globus, web services, other buzz word".

I've been trying to appoint someone onto an EPSRC Case studentship. The eligability rules are a nightmare. Apart from the fact that no one knows exactly what they are (I phoned up EPSRC and no one there knew!), they appear to be largely UK only. Other EU citizens can apply, but they need a three year residency in the UK. Stupid! The PhD is an international qualification. PhD students add immeasurably to the research environment. We should be glad that talented people want to come to the UK from abroad.

The core problem is, I think, that the PhD is considered to be an education, rather than a job. Thus, we have PhD students rather than researchers. This is only to the disadvantage of the students — they get treated poorly by the University system, it's harder to get loans or mortgages. Even the tax free status is a disadvantage — it saves the employer money, while the student comes out with a large gap in their stamps.

Ho hum.