New job! Old books!

New job! I’m now a Y-PERN fellow, officially based in the Management School at Sheffield University, but mostly working with the South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority (SYMCA, pronounced by folk who work there as ‘sim-ka’). Y-PERN (“Yorkshire & Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network”) is a pretty unique project – Research England funded it specifically …

Jordan Peterson’s zombie climate ideas

Jordan Peterson has written an attack on climate action for the Telegraph: “Peddlers of environmental doom have shown their true totalitarian colours”. Plenty of people have already pointed out Peterson’s basic climate science errors. Anyone who’s spent time arguing with climate deniers in the past ten to fifteen years won’t find anything remotely original – …

Prestigious Dan Olner fellowship

I’m thrilled to announce I have been awarded a prestigious Dan Olner fellowship… i.e. after six years in my current post and ten years postdocing in total, my academic contract finished and I am now living off my savings. This is, I am telling myself slightly unconvincingly, a good thing. Here’s the rough plan for …

Sheffield’s first Data-for-Good hack day

I was at Sheffield’s first data for good hack day on Saturday – it was bloomin’ Marvelous. Organised by Tom French and Lauren Quinn from Good Things Foundation and Sarah Miller, BI developer at Jet2, we were working with Amy Evans from youth homelessness charity Roundabout. (It’s sensitive data so we had to delete it …

Honest words / creativity in academia

Title stolen from this song by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins Coveredinbees 1.0 came about after I’d found out I got PhD funding, back in April 2006. That version now exists only on the wayback machine, hit and miss on what posts it kept. 2.0 ended recently, archived as a a flat website by the …