• Writing a letter to the editor and/or are letters to the editor becoming obsolete?

    This week I thought I should propose something different for your blog contribution. Originally, I thought I should assign everyone the same goal: write a short ‘letter to the editor’ based on an article that you feel the urgent need to comment … Continued

  • 2015 and the Millennium Development Goals

    With 2015 looming, I couldn’t resist taking a look at the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for this week’s topic.  The international community agreed these goals back in 1990 with a twenty-five year horizon (not long after the fall of the Berlin … Continued

  • Evidence-based policy making

    A number of my tweets and retweets this past week have focused in different respects on the notion of evidence-based policy. Most with any training in the sciences may well be confused by the very concept since it implies that there is, … Continued

  • Week 3: EU data protection laws, TTIP and industry responses

    The topic for this week was inspired by a short article in the FT about Amazon’s decision to site a data centre in Germany to create more confidence in Amazon’s ability to protect the data of Europeans and comply with data … Continued

  • Week 2: More science fiction? The quest for nuclear fusion and the case of public v private R&D

    Last week, we used driverless cars (which even a few year’s ago seemed more science fiction than reality) as a case for how a disruptive technology might challenge existing industry structures and may be leading firms to take R&D more … Continued

  • Week 1 Topic: Placing Bets on the Future — Automotive R&D, Driverless Cars and Innovation as Disruption

    In my original tweet, earlier today I responded to Anne Glover, the EC’s Chief Scientific Advisor, who was pointing out the importance of the automotive industry to European R&D.  She was undoubtedly referring to work of the Joint Research Centre, which in … Continued