Author: David Bradley

Researchers in Turkey have surveyed hundreds of students to ascertain five factors pertaining to the students’ perceptions of the attractiveness, controllability, efficiency, helpfulness and learnability of the University’s website.

Ersin Caglar of the European University of Lefke and Ahmet Mentes of the Namik Kemal University in Turkey explain that an institution’s website is the information gateway to its services and products. As such, it should be a reflection of the needs of the people it serves. They add that usability is an important aspect of website design but for all educational institutions this factor should be based on the needs of the primary target audience: the students.

The team’s survey and analysis of the results confirms that students are the most important stakeholder but also reveals that the level of satisfaction with the five main factors of website design can differ from faculty to faculty.

They suggest that common guidelines should be developed that allow for consistent design and navigation with the aim of improving the user experience on their specific institutional website, but with equal applicability across others. An application similar to this free design site will provide the best user experience. Such guidelines would not necessarily stifle creativity nor distinctiveness but would make using the site a more pleasant experience, give easier access to information, and be time-saving for students. There is an argument for all of the following to be included on an educational institution’s website, with particular emphasis on those of universities:

• List of offered courses (prospectus)
• Online application system
• Billing
• Course schedules and materials
• Academic calendar
• Results and exams
• Online lectures

Ersin Caglar, & S. Ahmet Mentes (2012). The usability of university websites — a study on European University of Lefke Int. J. Business Information Systems, 11 (1), 22-40

Imagine if all of the research papers you, your friends, family, anyone wanted to read were available, full text, for searching by hand and with computers and for data mining and cross referencing? It is done to a limited extent already by the NIH for preprints, with no demonstrable financial hardship to the research system. Traditional publishing models may need to be upgraded to this brave new world but the potentially exponentially expanding impact on research will open up so many more opportunities for business that even they will wonder why it wasn’t done sooner.

The plan is to extend the successful NIH program to all federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation. Heather Piwowar’s blog has more details and explains the petition process. #openaccess petition.

I posted about today’s fantastic four-track virtual Moog synthesiser doodle on Google first thing this morning, and apparently users have been creating ever since:

You did notice that it has four-track recording capabilities, didn’t you? Fab! Groovy! Get Moogy…

This diagram is an approximation of how BBC children’s news program “Newsround” (formerly John Craven’s Newsround) showed how the recent annular eclipse occurred.

Now, there’s simplifying and there’s just getting it totally wrong. I assume that they checked on Wikipedia for how eclipses occur because no one on staff had done a GCSE in science and simply misconstrued the diagram there. If someone on staff did study science at school, then they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

This is closer to what it should be:

The Google doodle for today celebrates the 78th birthday of musical synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog. The doodle itself is neat enough visually, but mouse those buttons and dials and you’ll discover it’s a fully functioning rendition of a Moog synth, with recording and playback.

Oh, and that issue of how to pronounce Robert’s surname? Apparently, there are three ways. The original Dutch would be Moch (with a short o, as in cop, and a thick, gutteral ch (as in the composer Bach). Us Brits usually pronounce it Mooog (with a long oo as in coool). Robert himself prefers a more Germanic pronunciation to rhyme with vogue, mogue. It should be a “Mogue” synthesiser. Except of course that even members of his family will use all three and perhaps other variants. I suspect if I started talking about Moch or Mogue synthesisers here in the UK I’d get some funny luchs from people confused by my novel brogue.

Do you think flower remedies work?

Apparently, Edward Bach, a bacteriologist trained in homeopathy and created some bacterial homeopathic remedies. He then branched out, says Science-based Medicine. He purportedly used his intuition to access a psychic connection to plants.

“He would hold his hand over different plants to see which one affected his emotional state, and he would collect the dew from that plant to use as a remedy,” says SBM.

The Wikipedia entry for Bach says the remedies are aimed not at curing disease but at rescuing you from emotional and spiritual woes: stress, insomnia, anxiety etc. There are no definitive trials to show that they do anything and certainly not that they help by offering you a psychic connection to plants.

Bach flower remedies are a 50:50 solution of brandy and water, and are said to work by transmitting a vibrational energy through the memory of water. This water being, not the plant sap or anything with perhaps some herbal potential, but simply the dew that has condensed on the bloom.

Bach explains the science underpinning the products in his 1936 book The Twelve Healers:

“From time immemorial it has been known that Providential Means has placed in Nature the prevention and cure of disease, by means of divinely enriched herbs and plants and trees. The remedies of Nature given in this book have proved that they are blest above others in their work of mercy; and that they have been given the power to heal all types of illness and suffering.”

Genuine herbal medicine often (not always) has physiologically active plant components on its side. Indeed, it has been estimated that around 3 or 4 of every ten pharmaceutical products has a direct natural product origin. Homeopathy is pure (but infinitely dilute) quackery. Flower remedies by contrast take sCAM (spurious complementary and alternative medicine) to a whole new level by attempting to infuse divine intervention and claims of providence into the remedies.

So, now, do you think flower remedies work? Bloomin’ idiotic if you ask me.

It hasn’t been hard graft so far, but should we stem the tide of organ donor slogans on Twitter? I think not. Keep ’em coming. No donation too small, no organ refused. Help someone liver little longer…wear your heart on your sleeve, even if we don’t see eye to eye, go on play a lung?

Tim Lihoreau has offered a dozen or so but worries that they’re now getting cornea, which is rich given “Guten Organ”…”Play the lung game”…and “Colon tight to your dreams”. Speaking of ELO, “Endow Liver, Organs”.

Have you got the guts to be an organ donor? It’s a no brainer, even for the spineless…it doesn’t entrail much effort. How about a “Cut out and keep” teeshirt?

In the end they will paraphrase Brucie…”Kidney do well!”

After a half century of trying, spectroscopists have finally pinned down the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum of plutonium-239. The finding will have implications for future studies of the solid-state physics of this important nuclear fuel and might point the way to improved approaches to the long-term storage of nuclear waste as well as the development of nuclear-powered spaceflight.

You can read the full story in my Chemistry World news update today. However, I have some additional comments on the technicalities of the work from team leader Georgios Koutroulakis of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Koutroulakis points out that working with highly pure plutonium(IV) oxide allowed them to achieve what others have been unable to do in fifty years. First, the non-magnetic ground state of the particular system studied helped them overcome the problem of the exceedingly short relaxation time (and huge resonance shift) of the plutonium-239 nucleus. “The energy gap between the ground state and the first excited magnetic state is quite large for the spins to dissipate their energy to the “lattice” in order to relax and, so, the relaxation time becomes reasonable and we can detect the signal,” he told me.

Cooling the system to close (4 Kelvin) to liquid helium temperatures was critical too. “At higher temperature it’s much easier for the spins to “hop” to higher energy states and consequently the relaxation becomes faster,” he explains. “For this reason exactly we went to low temperature, to assure that we were on average on the magnetic ground state hoping that T1 will be long enough and the shift small enough for us to be able able to observe the NMR signal, as proved to be the case.”

As to what they did differently from the many groups that have tried to obtain plutonium NMR spectra in the past: “The main limitation has been the very short T1/huge shift and, of course, the fact that people didn’t know where to look in terms of field-frequency without knowing the value of gamma-n. So, most of the relevant efforts have been concetrated on finding Pu-based materials in which, for one reason or another, these limitations are side-stepped, for instance systems with superconducting or antiferromagnetic ground states, but nothing had worked so far. We thought, contrary maybe to most people in the field, that working on a very pure sample of plutonium(IV) oxide in which Pu ions show a non-magnetic ground state we might have a chance to overcome the aforementioned limitations and observe the signal.”

Koutroulakis adds that his team was “clever” to choose the right system in which to look for the Pu NMR signal. “This, in combination with our very well-equipped NMR laboratory and exceptional knowhow (most NMR chemists, for example, cannot sweep their magnetic field and most solid-state NMR physicists don’t have access to such high-quality Pu-based samples), a lot of perseverance and patience (we had to try very long, time-consuming field sweeps with lots of different experimental/detection parameters), and a touch of luck of course (actually, we detected the signal when we were about to give up!) led to our finding.”

I asked NMR expert Ian Farnan of the University of Cambridge to comment on the importance of the work, he told me the first mention of the results was at a conference back in February. “It is an important breakthrough in actinide science as it provides an element specific insight into the local structural and magnetic environment of Pu in a range of materials,” Farnan says. “We have thought of searching for its resonance ourselves but have been put off by the wide frequency range and the low likelihood of lack of success. The Los Alamos group has to be congratulated and thanked because it is a great effort that opens up the field,” he adds.

Farnan and his colleagues have concentrated on the observation of NMR active ligands, such as oxygen-17 attached to actinides such as Pu using the magic-angle spinning (MAS) technique. This technique provides the high resolution that is required to distinguish subtle structural differences between local atomic environments in solids. “We are adapting the NMR equipment at the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Transuranic Elements for 239Pu observation,” he adds. “This possibility will be available to scientists through the EC FP7 programme EURACT-NMR.”

H. Yasuoka, G. Koutroulakis, H. Chudo, S. Richmond, D. K. Veirs, A. I. Smith, E. D. Bauer, J. D. Thompson, G. D. Jarvinen, D. L. Clark (2012). Observation of 239 Pu Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Science, 336, 901-904 : 10.1126/science.1220801

UPDATE #EveryLittleBitHelps – hashtag H/T to @JoForrest

There is far too much squeamishness regarding organ donation and transplant. Some of it is down to emotional attachment and denial, which is to be expected. Much of it is due to our own death anxiety, again an evolutionarily adaptation one can assume. Then there’s the question of religion, which muddies the waters of many a debate.

Regardless, it is time to break the taboos and quell the squeamishness. The potential for social media is great in this regard. If an 83-year old British man can donate a kidney to an anonymous recipient, purely altruistically and claim his fifteen minutes of fame in life, then each of us should stand up and be counted before it’s too late. Opt into the donor generation, tweet it, update your Facebook page, Google+ about it. Of course, breaking taboos needs slogans, so how about a few to get started…

Kidneys out! And proud

I have a spleen!

Too many broken hearts in the world (need a transplant)

Every little (organ) helps

Transplantation, that’s the name of the game

Hearts out for the lads

I only have eyes for you (and liver, kidneys and more)

A stitch in time, saves lives

Show me yours and I’ll give you mine

When will there be an organ harvest for the world?

And one for Apple fans: iDonate