Tom Roper's Weblog

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stake day

York 255: Fantasy Believer
Newbury 310: Morzine
Nedwbury 345: Peter Paul Rubens
Newbury 420: Azamour
Leopardstown 730: Alexander Ice Town
Leopardstown 800: Cairdeas
Goodwood next week: hurrah!

UMSLG: presentations now up

Some of the presentations are now up:  UMSLG Edinburgh meeting 2005.

The last word on Edinburgh

A few incidental things from Edinburgh:
UMSLG coincided with the G8; consequently Edinburgh was filled to bursting point with policemen, and the student residences where we stayed were used to billet police from all over the country. Much of modern police work seems to consist of hanging around reading the paper and waiting for something to happen, to judge by what I saw.
I went to the National Gallery of Scotland, to see two exhibitions, one of Landseer, which had lots of animals, alive and dead, and one of Gauguin, built around The Vision of the Sermon. The juxtaposition of the two was odd, and perhaps it was a bad idea to try to see both.
And finally I restored myself with drinks and the magnificent architecture of the former office of the Scotsman, now a cocktail bar called North Bridge.

BSMS in London Review of Books

One of our BSMS students has a diary piece in the new London Review of Books on learning to take blood:
Harrison, Sophie
Diary
London Review of Books 2005 27(14): 34-35
Online version for subscribers only

Tolpuddle

According to the BBC there were 10,000 there and I can well believe it. It was certainly the biggest Tolpuddle festival I've attended.
The best speaker was without a doubt Tony Benn, as inspiring and encouraging as ever, (though he struck a pessimistic note about the prospects of peace): "don't ask why the poor are poor, ask why the rich are rich?", the best music provided by Billy Bragg, who finished his set with two songs  written with and performed by the children of St Mary's Middle School, Puddletown, one for a play they had performed earlier in the day on the history of the Martyrs, and one about the G8, ending with an unaccompanied version of the Red Flag.
My photos are going up on Flickr soon. And Technorati lists a number of posts.

Off to Tolpuddle

We're off to Tolpuddle for the weekend. Not sure what this means for blogging: the infrastructure in a Dorset field is not very sophisticated.
But it should be good. I see there so far no Flickr photos tagged with Tolpuddle, so I claim the honour of being the first with last year's; more to come. A Technorati search on Tolpuddle finds a surprising number of posts.

From Informaticocopia: Royal Society study on the Impact of ICT on health and healthcare

Rod quotes it in full, or it's on the Royal Society website.

New Sappho poem: update

Having picked themselves up from the floor after laughing at my shoddy transcription of the new Sappho poem, several Hellenists, were kind enough to point out some of my errors and I've now posted a revised and corrected version, with particular thanks to Vicky Roupa who teaches the classical Greek class I attend.
One point though: I use GreekKeys, which is splendid, but for some reason the initial upper case upsilon with acute accent and smooth breathing renders correctly in Word, but when put into the blog it renders as a odd backspace character, thus ....not sure why. A lowercase one works perfectly: ὕ.

UMSLG Edinburgh 2005: Friday

After a morning run up Arthur's Seat wearing an Ovid t-shirt kindly given to me buy the exhibitors and breakfast in what looked like a police canteen, the first session started at 9.30. There are some photographs courtesy of Marshall Dozier, who had a beautifully small camera, I having forgotten mine, though there are also a few from my camera-phone.
The first session consisted of a very comprehensive paper from Pauline Simpson, Head of Information Services at the National Oceanography Centre on institutional repository developments. Southampton, not least because of the presence there of Stevan Harnad;
She gave an exposition of  open access,  the progress of the RCUK proposals (which are now out in en clair on the RCUK website , mentioned the JISC Open Access briefing paper and described repositories of all types  and the development of e-Prints Soton.
In discussion, an interesting idea that CILIP might develop a repository as part of our proposed research portal came up.
Then Marshall Dozier spoke  on the Medical Education Taxonomy Research Organisation, METRO (interest declared, I'm a member). And I fear there are no photographs, as I forgot to ask her for the camera while she spoke. She covered the need for the project and progress to date, having concentrated on the area of assessment, and asked UMSLG members to act as advocates for the project to help it achieve critical mass. The project used a blog to develop the taxonomy.
After coffee Paul Hollands brought us up to date with changes at the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (formerly LTSN-01), including their collaboration with the Health Sciences and Practice  subject centre, the new look web page which uses RSS news for most of the content of the print page. It set me thinking how we might use RSS to offer news to UMSLG members.
Catrina Dalziel of Swansea spoke of her experiences setting up library support for their new graduate entry course and Erika Gwynett described a library refurbishment at Newcastle. Chris Fowler closed the session with some concluding remarks and a presentation of flowers to Irene McGowan College Librarian for Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at Edinburgh, who had handled the local arrangements.

 

John Smiths Cup day

Chester 255: Strike up the Band
York 320: Lost Soldier Three
York 355: Mullins Bay