Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
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Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
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Comments: selections from a Guardian thread

Well, the PP was finally published last week, and we had a nice launch at Waterstone's in Gower St.  The Scribe PR team (i.e. Sarah) have been doing a great promotion job.  At the weekend we had a piece published on the Guardian/Observer website.  It provoked some excellent comments - of course the abusive ones were removed, but there was a good mixture of thoughtful and critical responses, including a number of relevant personal experiences.  A sample below: From FelonMarmer, on the Peter Principle: "one of the major aspects to incompetence is the failure to recognise competence in others - so once someone who is incompetent is put into a…
Read More

Queen of carbon

Mildred Dresselhaus died recently.  I'm afraid I'd never heard of her - a comment on my scientific literacy - but she was a great chemist, known among academics as the queen of carbon.  According to the Financial Times'  obituary, she helped to lay the foundations for nanotechnology, and published 1700 scientific papers as well as eight books.  That's some record for someone born into a poor Polish immigrant family, who went on to have four children herself. Dresselhaus received the $1million Kavli prize in nanoscience in 2012, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. So, a remarkable women, who also worked hard to…
Read More