Paul Sutton – personal blog
Women in Chemistry
To celebrate International Women's day, Compound Chemistry have released a great poster celebrating the contribution women have made to Chemistry.
Posting here too, in the hope it will inspire more Women and Girls in Science and Chemistry.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#Chemistry,#Women,#science,#international, #women's, #day,#women, #WomenInChemistry
Afghanistan in 2021
I wrote this a few weeks ago, intended to publish, but then the site went down. So am publishing now. The situation in the country has changed since this.
Firstly I am NOT an expert in any of this. I decided to write a follow up to my history of Afghanistan post [1]. This is in order to try and help make some sense of the current situation. Bringing together various wikipedia articles, which explain different related topics together.
As of August 2021. The Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan. Their intention seems to be to run the country as an Emirate[ [2], which, I think just describes the system of government, so I would guess this is a similar system to the UAE or United Arab Emirates [3]
By contrast and as a point of reference, IS / ISIS or Islamic State want to set up a Caliphate [4], which of course is a different system of ruling the country.
As we are talking about countries that follow Islam.There are two “denominations of Islam” [7] within this. One is Sunni [5] and Shia [6] Islam. So the same religion, just with a slightly different way of interpreting the Quran and or messages therein.
Over the centuries, as with Christianity (eg, Catholics & Protestants) the two systems have not seen eye to eye, all the time. The article [7] on Wikipedia, explains how relations have changed over the centuries.
As you can tell from this, the situation is pretty complex. There are lots of different ideas and clashes of cultures. Probably one of the reasons, the west will probably never be able to impose its own values on these countries. They have their own values, laws, morals, and ways of doing things, such as conducting every day business.
It seems, that while Taliban, have stopped men and women studying together in the same classes. They have NOT, as yet, stopped women from studying altogether. So they have kept their word, which is part of Islamic law.
I guess if the UK / England government tries to mention this to the Taliban, they could throw it back at Boris Johnson, who said he would not raise National Insurance, which is a different matter..
Disclaimer : I fully acknowledge that Wikipedia is NOT an academic source of information. However for the purpose of this article, I think it is good enough to refer to in order to help explain things. It is not an academic essay anyway.
References
1 History of Afghanistan 2 Emerate 3 United Arab Emirates 4 Caliphate 5 Sunni Islam 6 Shia Islam 7 Sunni – Shia Relations
Trojans Rookie Camps 2021
Date : Sunday 24th October 2021 Time : 10 am —> 14:00 Location : Foxhole playing field, Bellfield Road, Paignton
AGPL enforcement
The announcement of Donald Trumps social media network, could be in hot water before it has even been formally launched.
Below is a QUOTE
As you may have seen in the news today, Trump's media team has set up their own social network "Truth Social".
What they aren't admitting is it's actually just a Mastodon instance with all the Mastodon branding removed, including all of the messages acknowledging that it is FOSS, as required by the software's free open source licence. This is breaking the terms of the licence, and is essentially stealing the software from the volunteer community which made it.
This kind of behaviour cannot be accepted by anyone who believes in FOSS. Keeping to the requirements of a FOSS licence is fundamental to building software together. If powerful people get away with stealing FOSS, people may be reluctant to build FOSS in the first place.
So the issue is stated in the second paragraph above. It is looked at more in this article
Software freedom conservancy have taken up the case to try and enforce the AGPL and ensure compliance with the AGPL
There has been a similar case in the past – FSF vs Canon
Clearly this is an ongoing situation, If you want to follow this more closely I suggest you join mastodon and follow from there.
New way to find cancer at the nanometer scale
Lab-on-a-chip technology uses magnetic particles to identify biomarkers of concern before a tumor even forms [1]
Another really exciting and important discovery, a good reason to study STEM too,. I feel that we are truly on the verge of something here, a new era of medical detection, treatments and hopefully going to be saving lives at the same time. Full article at [1] with a link to Science Daily website at [2] There is a link to discourse but not discussion yet.
However you are more than welcome to discuss on Mastodon [4] with the science daily fedi id being @[email protected]
References
1 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211019223140.htm 2 https://www.sciencedaily.com 3. https://discourse.qoto.org/ 4. https://qoto.org
IOP Publishing makes abstracts openly available
Just sharing this, it is an important and very welcome development. All I have done is added numbers and reference list at the bottom so I can include it as quoted text. Sorry about the formatting.
IOP Publishing (IOPP) has joined the Initiative for Open Abstracts [1] (I4OA), a collaboration between publishers, infrastructure organisations, librarians, and researchers to promote the open availability of
abstracts.
IOPP will deposit abstracts of their scholarly communications with Crossref [2]
, the not-for-profit Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency bringing together abstracts in a common format in one searchable cross-disciplinary database.
By joining the initiative, IOPP will make all of its abstracts part of the
fundamental metadata of the article so that they will be openly available and
accessible to the scientific community for unrestricted machine reading. This
expanded availability of article abstracts will boost the discoverability of
scholarly research and increase their impact.
Daniel Keirs, IOPP’s Head of Journal Strategy and Performance, says: “We are
excited to be joining the I4OA initiative as it supports our goal of increasing
access to research in the disciplines we represent. We believe that I4OA will
help to enhance the impact, recognition and value of our researchers’ scholarly
publications through the unlimited, centralised discoverability the initiative
enables.”
Ludo Waltman, Coordinator of I4OA, says: “We are pleased to have IOPP join our
initiative. Having IOPP join a growing number of academic publishers shows their
continued commitment to open science to expand the world of physics. As one of
the largest publishers supporting I4OA, it’s great to have IOPP on board and we
hope that many other publishers will follow their lead”
Find out more on the I4OA website [3]
The post IOP Publishing makes abstracts openly available [4]
appeared first on IOP Publishing [5]
REFERENCES
1 https://i4oa.org 2 https://www.crossref.org 3 https://i4oa.org/ 4 https://ioppublishing.org/news/iop-publishing-makes-abstracts-openly-available 5 https://ioppublishing.org
Library Stem display part 2
I recently started a STEM display at Paignton Library. The idea of this is to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths) as a subject or set of subjects people can study and follow as a career.
I was sent some resources from the Royal Society of Chemistry [1] a while back to mostly use at the upcoming STEM group events. I decided to use one of the posters and some of the booklets to update the display, in anticipation of the upcoming chemistry week and STEM group event on November 13th.
On Saturday, I added the poster and some of the resources, since then the library have repositioned the display, which is great, as some of the resource are now in display stands and are therefore far better presented.
Be sure to keep dropping in to the library, to see what has changed, we have Chemistry week coming up and then the STEM group event on Saturday 13th November.
The pink a4 poster, is for the Open University, so I have included a link to them below.
Links
Catfish – file search
For some reason, XFCE doesn't come with a pre-installed file search facility and thunar lacks this feature.
However you can use the command line to search for files
find -name “file.png” for example
However this isn't really an option for a lot of users. The solution is a program called catfish, ( i guess you fish for files).
apt install catfish as root of course
Enter the file you are looking for in to the search box and press enter -
Results will be displayed
Hopefully this is helpful. I have asked about this on #debian and it seems to be something that needs to be addressed.
Safeguarding website error
Application forms for school work in Torbay include a section on safeguarding.
SCHOOL NAME is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and applicants must be willing to undergo the checks appropriate to the post applied for. By signing this application form you are confirming your agreement/commitment.
For further information visit www.swcpp.org.uk
This section directs the applicant to http://swcpp.org.uk/. For a long time now, this website has produced errors. I tried to add https:// in front and ended up with the 2nd error below. So basically I can't get to the website. Not even knowing what SWCPP stands for, I can't even use duckduckgo to look it up.
I am NOT IMPRESSED in any shape way or form. I can't contact the above website via e-mail either as both webmaster@ and info@ both get messaged returned. So can't even let them know about this.
The website does appear to be up, as it is possible to ping it.
ping swcpp.org.uk
PING swcpp.org.uk (195.188.176.219) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 195.188.176.219 (195.188.176.219): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=37.7 ms
64 bytes from 195.188.176.219 (195.188.176.219): icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=37.7 ms
64 bytes from 195.188.176.219 (195.188.176.219): icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=37.7 ms
^C64 bytes from 195.188.176.219 (195.188.176.219): icmp_seq=4 ttl=51 time=37.5 ms
You would think schools, who CLAIM to take safeguarding seriously, would at least check links on application forms (and elsewhere) work properly and review their application forms from time to time. I think this would be called due diligence. This would help identify problems early on. Even more so if those links are to a place that explain what background checks are.
Attempts to try and inform schools that the link does not work, have just fallen on deaf ears sadly.
If anyone does have concerns they can contact http://torbaysafeguarding.org.uk/professionals/hub/ who should be able to help, or of course contact the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) of the school.
I am making this post here to highlight the issue, hopefully someone will take notice. I have zero hope of this however.
At least 3 schools (including a primary school) in Torbay have been mentioned on https://www.everyonesinvited.uk/ too.
If anyone is able to contact the website, please can you let them know, it is broken and let schools know if this link is on application forms let the school know.
Contrast this experience to the recent problem with this blog (502 error), contacted the site owner and it got fixed pretty quickly.
Of course, this blog is just a personal site. Somehow a website that is to do with keeping children and young people safe is far more important to keep working or at least it could redirect to a working alternative website. .