E-ELT goes to Chile April 27, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 1 comment so far
As expected, ESO Council have accepted the recommendation to build the European Extremely Large Telescope at Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes. The decision was announced yesterday with the customary nice words and some cool accompanying imagery, video and a dedicated ESOCast episode, which you can all see here.
Particularly noteworthy is the nod of thanks ESO give to Spain, who were competing with Chile for the chance to to host the telescope. While many European astronomers, especially the Britons who’ve traditionally had the largest foreign presence on the island, have a great big soft spot for La Palma, I think a collective sigh of relief went through the community on hearing the news. La Palma is undoubtedly an excellent observing site, but it’s just not of the same quality as Paranal or Armazones – it’s more humid, has fewer clear nights and is plagued by Saharan sand in its atmosphere.
With this announcement, all three of the ELT-type telescopes – E-ELT, GMT and TMT – now have a home. Now all they need is money to start building!
Image: ESO/S. Brunier
Lucia cleared, Dutch justice shamed April 19, 2010
Posted by sarah in: politics . Add a commentQuick update from the frontlines of judicial excellence. As expected, nurse Lucia de Berk was cleared of all murder charges by the court of Arnhem on 14 April last week. The case has been extensively covered in the Dutch media, with some frank editorials, most of which are sadly hiding behind a paywall. The Haga Hospital, which owns the Juliana Children’s Hospital where Lucia worked at the time of her arrest, will pay her 45,000 euro in compensation for wrongfully firing her. While that’s a decent amount of money, given that the hospital’s own apparently shabby internal investigation led to her arrest in the first place, I think it’s a pretty measly gesture. The hospital’s own statement is very brief and terse.
Everyone’s been falling over each other to apologise to Lucia for this awful miscarriage of justice – Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Harm Brouwer, Chairman of the Public Prosecution – and apparently negotiations on what compensation she will receive from the government are ongoing.
As usual the best coverage comes from GeenStijl, the Netherlands’ answer to The Onion, who report that Lucia has signed up to star in Kafka: The Musical. If you know Dutch, go read.
Here’s a short news report in Dutch from NOS:
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Bad Science April 7, 2010
Posted by sarah in: politics, reviews . 3commentsOver the Easter weekend I finally got round to reading Ben Goldacre‘s Bad Science
Dutch commit to Open Access March 12, 2010
Posted by sarah in: politics, science . 1 comment so far
The Dutch science research council NWO has set up a 2.5 million euro fund (Dutch) to encourage its scientists to publish their work in open access journals. Under the scheme, any NWO grant holder can apply (English) for up to 5000 euro per project to pay open access publication charges. The incentive programme, which went live at the start of March, is a first step in the council’s broad commitment to open access in science.
In this interview (in Dutch) from November last year, NWO Chairman Jos Engelen, a particle physicist who was Chief Scientific Officer at CERN before taking over at NWO in 2009, indicates that the council may bring in an NIH-type public access policy for its grantholders later on this year. He suggests starting off with what he calls a “Swedish model”, whereby publications have to be made publicly available within 6 months of publication in an academic journal. This could then evolve towards a requirement that results from NWO-funded projects be published directly in open access journals only.
Engelen sounds like an excellent straight-talking Dutchman. He admits that right now there is a trade-off between impact and access, with many high-impact journals still charging for subscriptions – but that a natural consequence of NWO’s support for open access is to mirror this trade-off at the grant proposal level.
I was pleased to read about these developments, which reinforce my experience that the Dutch government has a very sensible and forward-thinking approach to funding science. I can’t find a timeline for implementation and hope these plans all get brought in swiftly.
There’s no deadline for applications to this new fund, money will be allocated to PIs on an ad hoc basis until the money runs out.
With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT March 4, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 3comments
Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)
ESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.
So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.
What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.
